CVE-2016-7072 Denial of service in pdns

What is CVE-2016-7072?

CVE-2016-7072 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 10 Sep 2018. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

An issue has been found in PowerDNS Authoritative Server before 3.4.11 and 4.0.2 allowing a remote, unauthenticated attacker to cause a denial of service by opening a large number of TCP connections to the web server. If the web server runs out of file descriptors, it triggers an exception and terminates the whole PowerDNS process. While it's more complicated for an unauthorized attacker to make the web server run out of file descriptors since its connection will be closed just after being accepted, it might still be possible.

Weakness: CWE-400, CWE-20

Which versions are affected by CVE-2016-7072?

It affects 2 products.

Products include Debian Debian Linux, Powerdns Authoritative.

How do I fix CVE-2016-7072?

Upgrade to a fixed version.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2016-7072 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2016-7072 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Debian Debian Linux

• CVE-2015-3306 ProFTPD Improper Access Control Exploited Critical 10.0
• CVE-2025-49113 RoundCube Webmail Deserialization of Untrusted Data Exploited Critical 9.9
• CVE-2026-24061 GNU InetUtils Argument Injection Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2025-39682 Linux Kernel Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2024-9680 Mozilla Firefox Use-After-Free Exploited Critical 9.8

All Debian Debian Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2016-7072, GHSA-64pc-8jh2-hf6v, UBUNTU-CVE-2016-7072.