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Public proof of concept

CVE-2012-4284

A public proof of concept exists; no exploitation attested.

  • Published2020-01-10

Am I affected?

With a domain, we read the version its public headers and pages expose. A distribution build can carry the fix under an older number.

Description

A Privilege Escalation vulnerability exists in Viscosity 1.4.1 on Mac OS X due to a path name validation issue in the setuid-set ViscosityHelper binary, which could let a remote malicious user execute arbitrary code

Timeline

dates in UTC
  1. 2012-08-13Exploit-DB entryExploit-DB

Observed activity

isMalicious corpus · updated 2026-11-03 09:37 UTC
Indicators tagged with this CVE, per day0 indicators over 7 days
Block these indicators
  • Firewall list (EDL, text): https://api.ismalicious.com/edl/cve/CVE-2012-4284?format=txt
  • CSV export: https://api.ismalicious.com/edl/cve/CVE-2012-4284?format=csv
  • TAXII collection of exploited CVEs
  • The EDL and CSV take an API key on the Pro plan.

Versions per branch

NVD
Sparklabs viscosity
BranchAffectedFixed in
1.4= 1.4.1no fix published

as publishedRanges as NVD and OSV publish them; a distribution’s build can be fixed under an older number.

Fix

Advisories and patches

Detection

read 2026-11-02 22:42 UTC
Nuclei template
none so far
ProjectDiscovery
Exploit-DB
EDB-20485EDB-24579
Exploit-DB
Proof-of-concept repositories
none listed
PoC-in-GitHub
Metasploit modules
1 moduleexploit/osx/local/setuid_viscosityrank: excellentModule metadata: Metasploit Framework, © Rapid7, Inc., BSD-3-Clause.
Metasploit Framework

Sources

Identifiers

Technical details

CVSS v3 Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Published
2020-01-10
Last Modified
2026-06-16
NVD status
Modified

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2012-4284?

A Privilege Escalation vulnerability exists in Viscosity 1.4.1 on Mac OS X due to a path name validation issue in the setuid-set ViscosityHelper binary, which could let a remote malicious user execute arbitrary code

Is CVE-2012-4284 actively exploited?

Active exploitation of CVE-2012-4284 has not been confirmed. Its EPSS score was 69.5% on 2026-11-02, the estimated probability of exploitation in the next 30 days.

What is the CVSS score for CVE-2012-4284?

CVE-2012-4284 has a CVSS v3 base score of 9.8 (CRITICAL severity), with vector string CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H.

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Sources for this record