The Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU) has identified five Local Privilege Escalation (LPE) vulnerabilities within the needrestart component, which is installed by default on Ubuntu Server. These vulnerabilities can be exploited by any unprivileged user to gain full root access without requiring user interaction. The identified flaws have been assigned the CVE identifiers CVE-2024-48990, CVE-2024-48991, CVE-2024-48992, CVE-2024-10224, and CVE-2024-11003, highlighting the need for immediate remediation to protect system integrity.

Our TRU team has successfully developed functional exploits for these vulnerabilities. While we will not disclose our exploits, please be aware that these vulnerabilities are easily exploitable, and other researchers may release working exploits shortly following this coordinated disclosure.

These vulnerabilities have been present since the introduction of interpreter support in needrestart version 0.8, released in April 2014.