CVE-2023-33538 — A101e-IoTvul
HIGHCVE-2023-33538 is a high-severity (CVSS 8.8) CWE-77 vulnerability. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2025-06-16) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.
TP-Link TL-WR940N V2/V4, TL-WR841N V8/V10, and TL-WR740N V1/V2 was discovered to contain a command injection vulnerability via the component /userRpm/WlanNetworkRpm .
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2025-06-16. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2025-07-07.
- 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-2023-33538.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2023-33538 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
TP-Link TL-WR940N V2/V4, TL-WR841N V8/V10, and TL-WR740N V1/V2 was discovered to contain a command injection vulnerability via the component /userRpm/WlanNetworkRpm .
Affected Products
tl-wr740n firmwaretp-linktl-wr841n firmwaretp-linktl-wr940n firmwaretp-linkResearch 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
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-2023-33538 yet. Track the upstream advisory, and apply the exposure-reduction steps below in the meantime.
Mitigate without a patch
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2023-33538 in your dependencies?
Find it across , including transitive dependencies.