CVE-2015-5073

CVE-2015-5073 is a critical heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability in the PCRE library (versions before 8.38), affecting products like IBM PCRE and PowerKVM. This flaw allows remote attackers to trigger a denial of service or extract sensitive heap memory information, potentially bypassing ASLR, through a specially crafted regular expression containing an excess closing parenthesis. With a CVSS score of 9.1 (Critical), it requires no user interaction and has low attack complexity, making it highly exploitable. While there is no evidence of active exploitation or publicly available exploit code in Metasploit, Nuclei, or ExploitDB, the vulnerability has garnered significant community discussion, indicating awareness among security researchers.