An issue was discovered in ntopng 3.4 before 3.4.180617. The PRNG involved in the generation of session IDs is not seeded at program startup. This results in deterministic session IDs being allocated for active user sessions. An attacker with foreknowledge of the operating system and standard library in use by the host running the service and the username of the user whose session they're targeting can abuse the deterministic random number generation in order to hijack the user's session, thus escalating their access.
Conclusion & alert: CVE-2018-12520 is rated High Exploit Risk (85.6/100): CVSS High severity, with high exploitation likelihood (EPSS 10.67%, 95th percentile). Core evidence: 4 public exploit reference(s) are indexed (Exploit-DB). EPSS rose +4.85% over the last day, indicating growing attacker interest. Mandatory action: Public exploits are available—assess exposure, apply mitigations, and prioritize patching.
Risk is dynamic; we continuously reassess and refresh what is shown on this page as upstream context changes.
| EDB-ID | Source | Kind | Published | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 44973 | exploit_db | edb | 2018-07-03 | Exploit-DB ↗ |
| — | nvd_ref | exploit_tag | Exploit-DB ↗ | |
| — | nvd_ref | exploit_tag | Exploit-DB ↗ | |
| — | nvd_ref | exploit_tag | Exploit-DB ↗ |
EPSS lead: Daily EPSS estimates relative likelihood of exploitation; percentile ranks this CVE among scored vulnerabilities (higher = more severe relative rank).
| # | Date | Old EPSS score | New EPSS score | Delta (New - Old) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2026-06-15 | 5.83% | 10.67% | +4.85% |
| 2 | 2026-01-27 | 7.34% | 5.83% | -1.51% |
| 3 | 2026-01-19 | — | 7.34% | — |
Full EPSS history (27 records total)
CVSS metrics for this CVE.
| Base score | Version | Severity | Vector | Exploitability | Impact | Score source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8.1 | 3.1 | HIGH |
|
2.2 | 5.9 | [email protected] |
| 6.8 | 2.0 | MEDIUM |
|
8.6 | 6.4 | [email protected] |
| vendor | priority | summary | link |
|---|---|---|---|
ubuntu
|
high | CVE-2018-12520 high priority: Ubuntu including 1 source packages (ntopng), 17 status rows across 17 suites (artful, bionic, cosmic, disco, eoan, focal, groovy, hirsute, impish, jammy, kinetic, lunar, mantic, noble, trusty, upstream, xenial): not-affected 9, ignored 3, released 3, DNE 2. | https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2018-12520 |
| URL | Tags |
|---|---|
| http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2018/Jul/14 | Exploit Mailing List Third Party Advisory |
| https://gist.github.com/Psychotropos/3e8c047cada9b1fb716e6a014a428b7f | Exploit |
| https://github.com/ntop/ntopng/commit/30610bda60cbfc058f90a1c0a17d0e8f4516221a | Patch |
| https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/44973/ | Exploit Third Party Advisory VDB Entry |