CVE-2019-3974 Path traversal in Tenable Nessus

What is CVE-2019-3974?

CVE-2019-3974 is a high-severity path traversal vulnerability in Tenable Nessus, published on 15 Aug 2019. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Nessus 8.5.2 and earlier on Windows platforms were found to contain an issue where certain system files could be overwritten arbitrarily, potentially creating a denial of service condition.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2019-3974?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Tenable Nessus.

How do I fix CVE-2019-3974?

No fix has been published for CVE-2019-3974 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.

Upgrade, and resolve every user-supplied path against an allowed base folder before opening it. More about Path traversal.

Is CVE-2019-3974 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2019-3974 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Tenable Nessus

• CVE-2022-4313 Command injection in Tenable.io, Tenable.sc and Nessus High 8.8
• CVE-2023-0524 Privilege escalation in Tenable.io, Tenable.sc, Nessus High 8.8
• CVE-2023-0101 Privilege escalation in Nessus High 8.8
• CVE-2022-32973 Privilege escalation in Nessus High 8.8
• CVE-2025-36630 Local Privilege Escalation High 8.4

All Tenable Nessus vulnerabilities

Sources

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

Also known as GHSA-rwwf-x95q-4c34.