CVE-2018-7716
No exploitation reported by the sources we read.
- Published2018-03-05
Am I affected?
Debian, Ubuntu or Red Hat sometimes backport a fix without changing the upstream version number: such a version reads « to verify », never « 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
PrivateVPN 2.0.31 for macOS suffers from a root privilege escalation vulnerability with its com.privat.vpn.helper privileged helper tool. This privileged helper tool implements an XPC service that allows arbitrary installed applications to connect and send messages. The XPC service extracts the config string from the corresponding XPC message. This string is supposed to point to an internal OpenVPN configuration file. If a new connection has not already been established, an attacker can send the XPC service a malicious XPC message with the config string pointing at an OpenVPN configuration file that he or she controls. In the configuration file, an attacker can specify a dynamic library plugin that should run for every new VPN connection. This plugin will execute code in the context of the root user.
Timeline
dates in UTC- 2018-03-0523:29CVE publishedNVD
Observed activity
isMalicious corpus · updated 2026-10-23 21:37 UTCBlock these indicators
- Firewall list (EDL, text): https://api.ismalicious.com/edl/cve/CVE-2018-7716?format=txt
- CSV export: https://api.ismalicious.com/edl/cve/CVE-2018-7716?format=csv
- TAXII collection of exploited CVEs
- The EDL and CSV take an API key on the Pro plan.
Versions per branch
NVD| Branch | Affected | Fixed in | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2.0 | = 2.0.31 | no fix published | NVD |
as publishedRanges as NVD and OSV publish them; a distribution’s build can be fixed under an older number.
Fix
No fix published by the sources we read yet. NVD record
Detection
- Nuclei template
- none so far ProjectDiscovery
- Exploit-DB
- no entry Exploit-DB
- Proof-of-concept repositories
- none listed PoC-in-GitHub
Sources
- NVDCVSS 3.09.8read 2026-10-23
- NVDCVSS 2.010read 2026-10-23
- FIRST EPSSEPSS score2.3 %2026-10-23
Technical details
- CVSS v3 Vector
- CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
- Published
- 2018-03-05
- Last Modified
- 2026-06-17
- NVD status
- Modified
Frequently asked questions
What is CVE-2018-7716?
Is CVE-2018-7716 actively exploited?
What is the CVSS score for CVE-2018-7716?
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