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Fencer Intel
critical 10.0

CVE-2014-9488 json

The is_utf8_well_formed function in GNU less before 475 allows remote attackers to have unspecified impact via malformed UTF-8 characters,…

published 2015-04-14 11 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2014-9307

cvss
10.0
version 2.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
3.9%
EPSS 3.9% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 90%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

The is_utf8_well_formed function in GNU less before 475 allows remote attackers to have unspecified impact via malformed UTF-8 characters, which triggers an out-of-bounds read.

Patch / fix

  • less Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 481-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2014-9488

  • less SLES for SAP 12 SP5, SLES 12 SP5 458-7.3.3

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2020:2687-1

  • less openSUSE Tumbleweed 481-1.5

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2024:10183-1

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2014-9488 updated cvss 2.5

less: out of bounds read access in is_utf8_well_formed()

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 less Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 less Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 less
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

3.89% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 90% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 2.0 10.0 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-119 Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.