CVE-2018-7281: Cactusvpn

High severity, CVSS 8.8. EPSS: 1.5% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

CactusVPN 5.3.6 for macOS contains a root privilege escalation vulnerability through a setuid root binary called runme. The binary takes a single command line argument and passes this argument to a system() call, thus allowing low privileged users to execute commands as root.

Affected products

• Cactusvpn Cactusvpn: version 5.3.6 only

Published 2018-02-21. Last modified 2026-06-17.