CVE-2024-48990

unknown

Published — · Modified —

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CVSS v3

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CVSS v4 NEW

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not yet in upstream

VIR risk

1.0

Description

Qualys discovered that needrestart, before version 3.8, allows local attackers to execute arbitrary code as root by tricking needrestart into running the Python interpreter with an attacker-controlled PYTHONPATH environment variable.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

20%

Patch ETA

—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

Exploits

Public proof-of-concept code below. AS-IS, for defenders and authorised testing only.

Metasploit modules

exploit_linux/local/ubuntu_needrestart_lpe rank 500

Ubuntu needrestart Privilege Escalation

Source fetch failed: fetch_error — view the original via the link above.

OS impact

Debian Fixed 5 releases

Version	Status	Fixed in
trixie	Fixed	`3.7-3.1`
sid	Fixed	`3.7-3.1`
forky	Fixed	`3.7-3.1`
bullseye	Fixed	`3.5-4+deb11u4`
bookworm	Fixed	`3.6-4+deb12u2`

References

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2024-48990

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.