CVE-2021-23874 — Total Protection
HIGHCVE-2021-23874 is a high-severity (CVSS 8.2) Improper Privilege Management vulnerability in mcafee total protection. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2021-11-03) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. A fix is available — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Arbitrary Process Execution vulnerability in McAfee Total Protection (MTP) prior to 16.0.30 allows a local user to gain elevated privileges and execute arbitrary code bypassing MTP self-defense.
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2021-11-03. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2021-11-17.
- 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-2021-23874.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2021-23874 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 395,249 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
Arbitrary Process Execution vulnerability in McAfee Total Protection (MTP) prior to 16.0.30 allows a local user to gain elevated privileges and execute arbitrary code bypassing MTP self-defense.
Affected Products
total protectionmcafeeResearch 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 mcafee total protection deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.
Fix
Apply the mcafee total protection security patch or hotfix for CVE-2021-23874 on the affected version, following the vendor advisory for your exact build.
Workarounds
Close the privilege gap rather than the entry point: audit which accounts, roles and service identities can reach the affected operation, drop the component to the least privilege it actually needs, and review file and directory permissions created by earlier installs — a default left in place is what makes this reachable. Alongside that, restrict the management interface to trusted networks and apply the vendor's recommended configuration mitigations.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2021-23874 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.