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CVE-2025-71212 is a local privilege escalation vulnerability in the Trend Micro Apex One Security Agent scan engine on Windows. The flaw is a link-following issue in the Virus Scan Engine that can be triggered by a local attacker who already has the ability to execute code with low privileges on the target system. Available reporting indicates the issue can be exploited by creating a symbolic link and abusing the VSApiNt.sys driver to perform arbitrary file deletion. That file deletion primitive can then be leveraged to escalate privileges and execute arbitrary code in the context of SYSTEM.
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What it means. What to do now. Patch path, mitigations, and the assume-compromise checklist.
What an attacker gets, and what they’ve been doing with it.
If you can’t patch tonight, do this now.
Patch, then assume compromise.
No public exploits tracked yet. Mallory keeps watching.
No public exploit code observed for this vulnerability.
Products and vendors Mallory has correlated with this vulnerability. Open in Mallory to drill down to specific CPE configurations and version ranges.
Vendor-confirmed product mapping. Mallory continuously reconciles this list against your asset inventory.
8 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
A link-following vulnerability in the Trend Micro Apex One scanning component that can allow a local attacker to escalate privileges.
A local privilege escalation vulnerability in the Trend Micro Apex One Windows agent that could allow a local attacker to gain elevated privileges.
Local privilege escalation vulnerability in Windows components of Trend Micro Apex One involving link following (CWE-59); requires the attacker to already be able to execute low-privileged code on the target endpoint.
A high-severity local privilege escalation vulnerability in the Trend Micro Apex One Windows agent scan engine involving link following.
Query your assets running an affected version, and investigate the blast radius.
Every observed campaign linking this CVE to a named adversary.
Malware families riding this exploit, with evidence and IOCs.
YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.
Cross-references every affected SKU, including bundled OEM variants.
Community discussion across Reddit, Mastodon, and other social sources.