Predictive Vulnerability Intelligence.

Product

  • Product
  • Pricing
  • Documentation

Company

  • About
  • Partnerships
  • Blog
  • Support

Legal

  • Terms
  • Privacy
  • Data Licensing

© 2026 FAUCET Technologies LLC. All rights reserved.

CVE-2017-12424

30
FAUCET Score

CVE-2017-12424 describes a critical vulnerability in the newusers tool within shadow before version 4.5, affecting Debian Linux and Shadow Project distributions. This flaw allows malformed input to cause crashes due to buffer overflows or other memory corruption, and can lead to unspecified behaviors, particularly crossing privilege boundaries in environments like web-hosting control panels. With a CVSS score of 9.8 (CRITICAL), it presents a high-impact, easily exploitable risk (AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H) with complete compromise of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Currently, there is no evidence of active exploitation, public exploit code (Metasploit, Nuclei, ExploitDB), or significant community discussion or media coverage.

Impacted Technologies

VendorProductVersion(s)CPE
< 4.5CPE matchmatch criteria
cpe:2.3:a:shadow_project:shadow:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*
9.0CPE matchmatch criteria
cpe:2.3:o:debian:debian_linux:9.0:*:*:*:*:*:*:*

CVSS Data

CVSS version used by this source: 3.1

9.8CRITICAL

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Attack Vector
NETWORK
Attack Complexity
LOW
Privileges Required
NONE
User Interaction
NONE
Scope
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality Impact
HIGH
Integrity Impact
HIGH
Availability Impact
HIGH
Exploitability Score
3.9
Impact Score
5.9
CvssVersion
3.1

Exploit Intelligence

EPSS Score
2.66%
Probability of exploitation in next 30 days
EPSS Percentile
84.1%
Percentile rank of EPSS score among Peer Group
As of 2026-07-26
Model: v2026.06.15
This CVE's current EPSS score of 0.0266 is in the 75th percentile among its peer group of 36,835 CVEs.

Social Chatter

The average CVE in this peer group has 0.0 Twitter, 0.1 Reddit, 0.3 Bluesky, 0.3 Mastodon, and 2.4 GitHub mentions.

Media Mentions

No media coverage found for this CVE.

The average CVE in this peer group has 0.3 InfoSec Media, 0.0 Vendor Blog, and 0.0 Security Researcher mentions.

Remediation

Patch Available

Vendor Patches (1)

github_advisorypatch availablevia nvd_reference
View patch

Vendor Advisories (1)

redhatCVE-2017-12424Moderate

shadow-utils: Buffer overflow via newusers tool

Mar 31, 2017

References

bugs.debian.org / cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi
Issue TrackingThird Party Advisory
bugs.launchpad.net / ubuntu/+source/shadow/+bug/1266675
Issue TrackingThird Party Advisory
github.com / shadow-maint/shadow/commit/954e3d2e7113e9ac06632aee3c69b8d818cc8952
PatchThird Party Advisory
lists.debian.org / debian-lts-announce/2021/03/msg00020.html
Mailing ListThird Party Advisory
security.gentoo.org / glsa/201710-16
Third Party Advisory