CVE-2021-27877
HIGHCVE-2021-27877 is a high-severity (CVSS 8.2) vulnerability. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2023-04-07) and has been used in ransomware campaigns — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.
An issue was discovered in Veritas Backup Exec before 21.2. It supports multiple authentication schemes: SHA authentication is one of these. This authentication scheme is no longer…
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2023-04-07 — including use in ransomware campaigns. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2023-04-28.
- 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-2021-27877.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2021-27877 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 395,249 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the 50–90% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
An issue was discovered in Veritas Backup Exec before 21.2. It supports multiple authentication schemes: SHA authentication is one of these. This authentication scheme is no longer used in current versions of the product, but hadn't yet been disabled. An attacker could remotely exploit this scheme to gain unauthorized access to an Agent and execute privileged commands.
Affected Products
backup execveritasResearch use only. For defensive security, authorized penetration testing, and academic research only. Never execute exploit code against systems without explicit written authorization.
An issue was discovered in Veritas Backup Exec before 21.2. It supports …
An issue was discovered in Veritas Backup Exec before 21.2. It supports …
An issue was discovered in Veritas Backup Exec before 21.2. It supports …
Detection & mitigation playbook
VulnerabilityDetect
Identify every host running the affected component and compare the installed build against the fixed version below — for source-built or distro-packaged software the version string, not a lockfile, is the source of truth (`dpkg -l`, `rpm -q`, or the binary's own `--version`).
Remediation status
No fixed release is recorded for CVE-2021-27877 yet. Track the upstream advisory, and apply the exposure-reduction steps 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.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2021-27877 in your dependencies?
Find it across , including transitive dependencies.