CVE-2012-5076 — JRE
CRITICALCVE-2012-5076 is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.8) CWE-284 vulnerability in oracle jre. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2022-03-28) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.
Unspecified vulnerability in the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) component in Oracle Java SE 7 Update 7 and earlier allows remote attackers to affect confidentiality, integrity, and…
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2022-03-28. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2022-04-18.
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA (KEV catalog and SSVC triage) for CVE-2012-5076.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2012-5076 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). In the shaded patch-first corner (EPSS 50%+, CVSS 7.0+).
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 394,803 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the ≥ 90% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
Unspecified vulnerability in the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) component in Oracle Java SE 7 Update 7 and earlier allows remote attackers to affect confidentiality, integrity, and availability, related to JAX-WS.
Affected Products
jreoraclelinux enterprise desktopsuseResearch use only. For defensive security, authorized penetration testing, and academic research only. Never execute exploit code against systems without explicit written authorization.
Java Applet - AverageRangeStatisticImpl Remote Code Execution (Metasploit)
by Metasploit · Jan 24, 2013
Java Applet - JAX-WS Remote Code Execution (Metasploit)
by Metasploit · Nov 13, 2012
Detection & mitigation playbook
Vendor / applianceDetect
Inventory every oracle jre deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.
Remediation status
No patch has shipped for CVE-2012-5076 yet — track the oracle jre advisory for a fixed release and apply the workarounds below in the meantime.
Mitigate without a patch
Put an independent control in front of the weakness: restrict the affected endpoint or interface to trusted networks, require an additional authentication factor or proxy-level check, and invalidate existing sessions and credentials in case the flaw has already been used. Alongside that, restrict the management interface to trusted networks and apply the vendor's recommended configuration mitigations.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 | java-1.7.0-openjdk-1:1.7.0.9-2.3.3.el6_3.1 | RHSA-2012:1386 |
| Supplementary for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 | java-1.7.0-oracle-1:1.7.0.9-1jpp.3.el6_3 | RHSA-2012:1391 |
| Supplementary for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 | java-1.7.0-ibm-1:1.7.0.3.0-1jpp.2.el6_3 | RHSA-2012:1467 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2012-5076 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.