How should we interpret CVSS severity scores?

CVSS estimates technical severity, but it does not automatically equal business risk. Prioritize using context like internet exposure, asset criticality, known exploitation, and whether compensating controls exist. A Medium CVSS on an exposed production system can be more urgent than a Critical on an isolated non-production host.

Vulnerability Database

Q: What is a Vulnerability (CVE) and why does it matter?

A security vulnerability is a weakness in software, hardware, or configuration that can be exploited to compromise confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Many vulnerabilities are tracked as CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), which provide a standardized identifier so teams can coordinate patching, mitigation, and risk assessment across tools and vendors.

Q: What's the difference between a vulnerability, an exploit, and a zero-day?

A vulnerability is the underlying weakness. An exploit is the method or code used to take advantage of it. A zero-day is a vulnerability that is unknown to the vendor or has no publicly available fix when attackers begin using it. Risk increases sharply when exploitation becomes reliable or widespread.

Q: Why do vulnerabilities keep reappearing in our environment?

Recurring findings usually come from incomplete asset discovery, inconsistent patch management, inherited images, and configuration drift. In modern environments, you also need to watch the software supply chain: dependencies, containers, build pipelines, and third-party services can reintroduce the same weakness even after you patch a single host.

Q: How do we prioritize remediation without burning out the team?

Use a repeatable triage model: focus first on externally exposed assets, high-value systems (identity, VPN, email, production), vulnerabilities with known exploits, and issues that enable remote code execution or privilege escalation. Then enforce patch SLAs and track progress so remediation is steady, not reactive.

Q: How can SynScan help reduce vulnerability risk over time?

SynScan combines attack surface monitoring and continuous security auditing to keep your inventory current, flag high-impact vulnerabilities early, and help you turn raw findings into a practical remediation plan.

325,773

Total vulnerabilities in the database

CVE-2014-6072

All 2.0.X, 2.1.X, 2.2.X, 2.3.X, 2.4.X, and 2.5.X versions of the Symfony WebProfiler bundle are affected by this security issue.

This issue has been fixed in Symfony 2.3.19, 2.4.9, and 2.5.4. Note that no fixes are provided for Symfony 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2 as they are not maintained anymore.

Description

The Symfony Web Profiler is a great development tool, but it should not be enabled on production servers. If it is enabled in production, it must be properly secured so that only authorized people have access to it. Developers must be very cautious about this as the Web Profiler gives many sensitive information about a Symfony project and any attackers can exploit many of them. Just to name a few sensitive information: user logins, user cookies, executed SQL statements, ...

That being said, the import/export feature of the web profiler is exploitable even if the Web Profiler is secured as the form to import a profiler is not protected against CSRF attacks. Combined with the fact that profiles are imported as a PHP serialized string, it makes your application vulnerable to code injection.

Resolution

As the import/export feature of the Web Profiler is not that useful, and because PHP serialize/unserialize functions have a long history of vulnerabilities, I decided to remove this feature from the Web interface and move it as CLI commands.

If you were relying on this feature, you now need to use the profiler:import and profiler:export Symfony commands provided by the WebProfiler bundle from the command line interface.

Those commands are not enabled by default and must be activated explicitly. For Symfony 2.4+, you can import them in your app/config.yml configuration file:

import:
   - { resource: &quot;%kernel.root_dir%/../vendor/symfony/symfony/src/Symfony/Bundle/WebProfilerBundle/Resources/config/commands.xml&quot; }

For Symfony 2.3, you can use the following snippet of code in app/console:

$kernel = new AppKernel($env, $debug);
$application = new Application($kernel);
if ($kernel-&gt;getContainer()-&gt;has(&#039;profiler&#039;)) {
    $profiler = $kernel-&gt;getContainer()-&gt;get(&#039;profiler&#039;);
    $application-&gt;add(new ImportCommand($profiler));
    $application-&gt;add(new ExportCommand($profiler));
}
$application-&gt;run($input);

At this point, I want to reiterate that you should never enable the Symfony Web Profiler on your production servers as this is a development tool. And if you need to enable it, double-check that it is properly secured.

The patch for this issue is available here: https://github.com/symfony/symfony/pull/11832

Published: May 30, 2024
Updated: Jun 27, 2024
CVE: CVE-2014-6072
GHSA: GHSA-v35g-4rrw-h4fw
Severity: High
Exploit:

CVSS v3:

Severity: Unknown
Score:
AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

CWEs:

CWE-94

Affected Software
References

Software	From	Fixed in
symfony / symfony	2.0.0	2.3.19
symfony / symfony	2.4.0	2.4.9
symfony / symfony	2.5.0	2.5.4
symfony / web-profiler-bundle	2.0.0	2.3.19
symfony / web-profiler-bundle	2.4.0	2.4.9
symfony / web-profiler-bundle	2.5.0	2.5.4

Deep Security Visibility Without the Complexity

SynScan provides clear, real-time security insights so you can monitor your attack surface, spot risks early, and act fast—without extra complexity.

No setup fees
5-min deployment
Cancel anytime

Book a Demo

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Vulnerability (CVE) and why does it matter?

A security vulnerability is a weakness in software, hardware, or configuration that can be exploited to compromise confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Many vulnerabilities are tracked as CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), which provide a standardized identifier so teams can coordinate patching, mitigation, and risk assessment across tools and vendors.

CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) estimates technical severity, but it doesn't automatically equal business risk. Prioritize using context like internet exposure, affected asset criticality, known exploitation (proof-of-concept or in-the-wild), and whether compensating controls exist. A "Medium" CVSS on an exposed, production system can be more urgent than a "Critical" on an isolated, non-production host.

A vulnerability is the underlying weakness. An exploit is the method or code used to take advantage of it. A zero-day is a vulnerability that is unknown to the vendor or has no publicly available fix when attackers begin using it. In practice, risk increases sharply when exploitation becomes reliable or widespread.

Recurring findings usually come from incomplete Asset Discovery, inconsistent patch management, inherited images, and configuration drift. In modern environments, you also need to watch the software supply chain: dependencies, containers, build pipelines, and third-party services can reintroduce the same weakness even after you patch a single host. Unknown or unmanaged assets (often called Shadow IT) are a common reason the same issues resurface.

Use a simple, repeatable triage model: focus first on externally exposed assets, high-value systems (identity, VPN, email, production), vulnerabilities with known exploits, and issues that enable remote code execution or privilege escalation. Then enforce patch SLAs and track progress using consistent metrics so remediation is steady, not reactive.

SynScan combines attack surface monitoring and continuous security auditing to keep your inventory current, flag high-impact vulnerabilities early, and help you turn raw findings into a practical remediation plan.