CVE-2023-25146 — A security agent link following vulnerability in the Trend Micro Apex One agent

A security agent link following vulnerability in the Trend Micro Apex One agent could allow a local attacker to quarantine a file, delete the original folder and replace with a junction to an arbitrary location, ultimately leading to an arbitrary file dropped to an arbitrary loca

01What is this vulnerability?

A security agent link following vulnerability in the Trend Micro Apex One agent could allow a local attacker to quarantine a file, delete the original folder and replace with a junction to an arbitrary location, ultimately leading to an arbitrary file dropped to an arbitrary location.

02Affected products

Vendor	Product	Versions
Trend Micro, Inc.	Trend Micro Apex One	2019 (14.0)

03Active exploitation status

Not currently listed on the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. EPSS is the best forward-looking signal — see the EPSS row above.

04Recommended remediation

• Patch to a fixed version listed in the vendor advisory (see references below).
• Mitigate with WAF rules, network egress filters, or feature flags where the patch is not yet available.
• Hunt historical logs for exploitation indicators — see Detection signatures below.

05Technical details

For the full vendor write-up, exploit chains, and reference implementations, see the references list in section 09.

06Detection signatures

Ask SARA in chat to draft a starting detection for this CVE in your stack of choice.

07Related CVEs

No directly-cited follow-up CVEs in the KB record for this advisory. The references list in section 09 carries the vendor cross-references.

08Timeline

• Published: 2023-03-07T22:19:52.381Z
• Last modified: 2025-03-05T20:45:51.729Z

09References

• success.trendmicro.com — https://success.trendmicro.com/solution/000292209
• www.zerodayinitiative.com — https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/advisories/ZDI-23-172/