CVE-2019-12576: Londontrustmedia Private Internet Access VPN Client

High severity, CVSS 7.8. EPSS: 0.9% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

A vulnerability in the London Trust Media Private Internet Access (PIA) VPN Client v82 for macOS could allow an authenticated, local attacker to run arbitrary code with elevated privileges. The openvpn_launcher binary is setuid root. This program is called during the connection process and executes several operating system utilities to configure the system. The networksetup utility is called using relative paths. A local unprivileged user can execute arbitrary commands as root by creating a networksetup trojan which will be executed during the connection process. This is possible because the PATH environment variable is not reset prior to executing the OS utility.

Affected products

• Londontrustmedia Private Internet Access VPN Client: version 82 only

Published 2019-07-11. Last modified 2026-06-17.