CVE-2019-18988 (actively exploited)

In plain English

A high-severity security flaw in Desktop from TeamViewer. Attackers are actively exploiting it in the wild (listed by CISA on November 3, 2021). The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 4.7% (higher than 92% of all known vulnerabilities). Ready-made attack tooling exists: Metasploit, public proof-of-concept code. Apply updates per vendor instructions.

Official description

TeamViewer Desktop through 14.7.1965 allows a bypass of remote-login access control because the same key is used for different customers' installations. It used a shared AES key for all installations since at least as far back as v7.0.43148, and used it for at least OptionsPasswordAES in the current version of the product. If an attacker were to know this key, they could decrypt protect information stored in the registry or configuration files of TeamViewer. With versions before v9.x , this allowed for attackers to decrypt the Unattended Access password to the system (which allows for remote login to the system as well as headless file browsing). The latest version still uses the same key for OptionPasswordAES but appears to have changed how the Unattended Access password is stored. While in most cases an attacker requires an existing session on a system, if the registry/configuration keys were stored off of the machine (such as in a file share or online), an attacker could then decrypt the required password to login to the system.

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Vendor

Product

Versions

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CVE-2019-18988

In plain English

CISA guidance

Official description

Affected products (as reported)

References