Weakness · High

CWE-693: Protection Mechanism Failure

What it is

The product does not use or incorrectly uses a protection mechanism that provides sufficient defense against directed attacks against the product.

11 exploited in the wildMITRE CWE 4.19.1

Severity (our rating): High
Likelihood of exploit: Not rated by MITRE
Introduced during: Architecture and Design, Implementation, Operation
Exploited in the wild: 11 known exploited CVEs

In more detail

This weakness covers three distinct situations. A "missing" protection mechanism occurs when the application does not define any mechanism against a certain class of attack. An "insufficient" protection mechanism might provide some defenses - for example, against the most common attacks - but it does not protect against everything that is intended. Finally, an "ignored" mechanism occurs when a mechanism is available and in active use within the product, but the developer has not applied it in some code path.

What an attacker can do

Bypass Protection Mechanism (Access Control)

How to prevent it

MITRE lists no specific mitigation for this weakness. Treat it like its parent weaknesses below: validate input, keep the design simple and review the code where it could appear.

CWE-693 on MITRE's CWE site

Exploited in the wild: 11 CVEs

Vulnerabilities caused by CWE-693 that attackers have used, from CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, newest first.

All known exploited vulnerabilities

H2 Security

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Source: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.