Threat actors who have been behind the exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability in BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access (PRA) and Remote Support (RS) merchandise in December 2024 doubtless additionally exploited a beforehand unknown SQL injection flaw in PostgreSQL, in response to findings from Rapid7.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-1094 (CVSS rating: 8.1), impacts the PostgreSQL interactive instrument psql.
“An attacker who can generate a SQL injection by way of CVE-2025-1094 can then obtain arbitrary code execution (ACE) by leveraging the interactive instrument’s capability to run meta-commands,” safety researcher Stephen Fewer stated.
The cybersecurity firm additional famous that it made the invention as a part of its investigation into CVE-2024-12356, a just lately patched safety flaw in BeyondTrust software program that permits for unauthenticated distant code execution.
Specifically, it discovered that “a profitable exploit for CVE-2024-12356 needed to embody exploitation of CVE-2025-1094 with the intention to obtain distant code execution.”
In a coordinated disclosure, the maintainers of PostgreSQL launched an replace to handle the issue within the following variations –
- PostgreSQL 17 (Fixed in 17.3)
- PostgreSQL 16 (Fixed in 16.7)
- PostgreSQL 15 (Fixed in 15.11)
- PostgreSQL 14 (Fixed in 14.16)
- PostgreSQL 13 (Fixed in 13.19)
The vulnerability stems from how PostgreSQL handles invalid UTF-8 characters, thus opening the door to a situation the place an attacker may exploit an SQL injection by making use of a shortcut command “!”, which allows shell command execution.
“An attacker can leverage CVE-2025-1094 to carry out this meta-command, thus controlling the working system shell command that’s executed,” Fewer stated. “Alternatively, an attacker who can generate a SQL injection by way of CVE-2025-1094 can execute arbitrary attacker-controlled SQL statements.”
The growth comes because the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added a safety flaw impacting SimpleHelp distant assist software program (CVE-2024-57727, CVSS rating: 7.5) to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, requiring federal companies to use the fixes by March 6, 2025.