CVE-2016-4523 — Vtscada
HIGHCVE-2016-4523 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) Out-of-bounds Read vulnerability in trihedral vtscada. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2022-04-15) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. A fix is available — see the affected versions and patch details below.
The WAP interface in Trihedral VTScada (formerly VTS) 8.x through 11.x before 11.2.02 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (out-of-bounds read and application crash)…
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2022-04-15. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2022-05-06.
- 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-2016-4523.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2016-4523 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 10–50% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
The WAP interface in Trihedral VTScada (formerly VTS) 8.x through 11.x before 11.2.02 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (out-of-bounds read and application crash) via unspecified vectors.
Affected Products
vtscadatrihedralResearch use only. For defensive security, authorized penetration testing, and academic research only. Never execute exploit code against systems without explicit written authorization.
Detection & mitigation playbook
Vendor / applianceDetect
Inventory every trihedral vtscada deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.
Fix
Apply the trihedral vtscada security patch or hotfix for CVE-2016-4523 on the affected version, following the vendor advisory for your exact build.
Workarounds
Constrain what reaches the vulnerable code: limit the size and shape of untrusted input, isolate the affected component in a sandboxed or least-privileged process, and enable the platform's memory-safety mitigations (ASLR, stack protector, hardened allocator) so an out-of-bounds access is more likely to fail closed than to be exploitable. Alongside that, restrict the management interface to trusted networks and apply the vendor's recommended configuration mitigations.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2016-4523 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.