CVE-2020-7789 is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.6) OS Command Injection vulnerability in node-notifier. A fix is available for node-notifier — see the affected versions and patch details below.
OS Command Injection in node-notifier
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2020-7789 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 385,386 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Real-World Exposure
How broadly this vulnerability is actually deployed: weekly install volume shows current usage, and reverse-dependency count shows how many other packages break if it stays unpatched.
node-notifiernpmDescription
This affects the package node-notifier before 9.0.0. It allows an attacker to run arbitrary commands on Linux machines due to the options params not being sanitised when being passed an array.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | node-notifier | all versions | 8.0.1npm install node-notifier@8.0.1 |
Affected Products
node-notifiernode-notifier_projectDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for node-notifier, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update node-notifier to 8.0.1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2020-7789 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Stop passing untrusted input into the interpreter or shell: call the affected binary with an argument array rather than a composed command string, reject anything outside a strict allowlist of expected values, and run the component under an account that cannot reach beyond the work it legitimately does.
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.
Whilst the OpenShift ServiceMesh (OSSM) and OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) containers include the vulnerable nodejs-node-notifier library, the successful exploitation requires additional packages on the node (like desktop notification library) which are not part of the OpenShift ServiceMesh or OpenShift Container…
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Automation Hub 4.2 for RHEL 7 | automation-hub-0:4.2.2-1.el7pc | RHSA-2021:0781 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2020-7789 in your dependencies?
Find it across npm, including transitive dependencies.