CVE-2022-42948 — Cobalt Strike
CRITICALCVE-2022-42948 is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.8) CWE-116 vulnerability in helpsystems cobalt strike. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2023-03-30) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.
Cobalt Strike 4.7.1 fails to properly escape HTML tags when they are displayed on Swing components. By injecting crafted HTML code, it is possible to remotely execute code in the Cobalt Strike UI.
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2023-03-30. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2023-04-20.
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- 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-2022-42948.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2022-42948 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
Cobalt Strike 4.7.1 fails to properly escape HTML tags when they are displayed on Swing components. By injecting crafted HTML code, it is possible to remotely execute code in the Cobalt Strike UI.
Affected Products
cobalt strikehelpsystemsResearch 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 helpsystems cobalt strike deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.
Remediation status
No patch has shipped for CVE-2022-42948 yet — track the helpsystems cobalt strike 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-2022-42948 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.