CVE-2013-7331 — Internet Explorer
MEDIUMCVE-2013-7331 is a medium-severity (CVSS 6.5) CWE-209 vulnerability in microsoft internet explorer. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2022-05-25) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.
The Microsoft.XMLDOM ActiveX control in Microsoft Windows 8.1 and earlier allows remote attackers to determine the existence of local pathnames, UNC share pathnames, intranet hostnames,…
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2022-05-25. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2022-06-15.
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA (KEV catalog and SSVC triage) for CVE-2013-7331.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2013-7331 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 394,803 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the 50–90% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
The Microsoft.XMLDOM ActiveX control in Microsoft Windows 8.1 and earlier allows remote attackers to determine the existence of local pathnames, UNC share pathnames, intranet hostnames, and intranet IP addresses by examining error codes, as demonstrated by a res:// URL, and exploited in the wild in February 2014.
Affected Products
internet explorermicrosoftResearch use only. For defensive security, authorized penetration testing, and academic research only. Never execute exploit code against systems without explicit written authorization.
The Microsoft.XMLDOM ActiveX control in Microsoft Windows 8.1 and earlie…
The Microsoft.XMLDOM ActiveX control in Microsoft Windows 8.1 and earlie…
The Microsoft.XMLDOM ActiveX control in Microsoft Windows 8.1 and earlie…
The Microsoft.XMLDOM ActiveX control in Microsoft Windows 8.1 and earlie…
Detection & mitigation playbook
Vendor / applianceDetect
Inventory every microsoft internet explorer deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.
Remediation status
No patch has shipped for CVE-2013-7331 yet — track the microsoft internet explorer advisory for a fixed release and apply the workarounds below in the meantime.
Mitigate without a patch
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands. Alongside that, restrict the management interface to trusted networks and apply the vendor's recommended configuration mitigations.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2013-7331 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.