CVE-2024-48991: Needrestart Project Needrestart

High severity, CVSS 7.8. EPSS: 6% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

Qualys discovered that needrestart, before version 3.8, allows local attackers to execute arbitrary code as root by winning a race condition and tricking needrestart into running their own, fake Python interpreter (instead of the system's real Python interpreter). The initial security fix (6ce6136) introduced a regression which was subsequently resolved (42af5d3).

Affected products

• Needrestart Project Needrestart: before 3.8 (fixed in 3.8)

Published 2024-11-19. Last modified 2026-06-17.