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Fencer Intel
high 7.8

CVE-2017-16667 json

backintime (aka Back in Time) before 1.1.24 did improper escaping/quoting of file paths used as arguments to the 'notify-send' command, lea…

published 2017-11-08 9 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2017-7851

cvss
7.8
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.5%
EPSS 1.5% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 73%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

backintime (aka Back in Time) before 1.1.24 did improper escaping/quoting of file paths used as arguments to the 'notify-send' command, leading to some parts of file paths being executed as shell commands within an os.system call in qt4/plugins/notifyplugin.py. This could allow an attacker to craft an unreadable file with a specific name to run arbitrary shell commands.

Patch / fix

  • backintime_project backintime 1.1.24
  • backintime Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 1.1.24-0.1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2017-16667

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-2017-16667 updated cvss 7.8

backintime: Improper escaping/quoting of file paths

  • Red Hat All currently supported Red Hat products
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

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

1.46% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 73% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.0 7.8 CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 2.0 9.3 AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-78 Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an OS Command

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.