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Fencer Intel
high 7.5

CVE-2015-8860 json

Symlink Arbitrary File Overwrite in tar

published 9y ago modified 4mo ago also GHSA-gfjr-3jmm-4g9v , EUVD-2017-0237

cvss
7.5
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
4.0%
EPSS 4.0% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 90%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

The tar package before 2.0.0 for Node.js allows remote attackers to write to arbitrary files via a symlink attack in an archive.

Patch / fix

  • npm tar 2.0.0
  • node-tar Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 2.2.1-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2015-8860

  • node-tar Ubuntu Pro 14.04 LTS 0.1.18-1ubuntu0.1~esm1
  • node-tar Ubuntu Pro 16.04 LTS 1.0.3-2ubuntu0.1~esm1

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2015-8860

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

Is CVE-2015-8860 in your dependencies? Fencer shows which of your repositories are affected as soon as an advisory lands, and opens the fix as a pull request.

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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-2015-8860 updated cvss 4.3

nodejs-tar: insecure processing of symbolic links during package processing

  • Red Hat Software Collections nodejs010-nodejs-tar
    affected: no fix available

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

4.00% 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 3.0 7.5 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
NVD 2.0 5.0 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:P/A:N
GitHub 3.0 7.5 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
npm tar
<2.0.0
2.0.0

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-59 Improper Link Resolution Before File Access
Technology feeds

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.