CVE-2015-7418 IBM CVE debrief

Who should care

IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale and WebSphere DataPower XC10 Appliance administrators, especially teams that run these products on shared systems or where local administrative access is broad.

Technical summary

NVD classifies this issue as CWE-200 and rates it CVSS 3.0 4.4 (AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N). The vulnerability description indicates that sensitive data may remain in memory rather than being cleared, creating a post-use exposure risk for a local user who already has administrator privileges. NVD’s affected CPE list includes IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale 7.1.0, 7.1.1, 8.5, and 8.6.

Defensive priority

Medium priority for environments running the affected IBM products, because exploitation requires local administrative privileges but can expose high-value sensitive data.

Recommended defensive actions

• Review IBM PSIRT guidance for CVE-2015-7418 and apply the vendor-recommended update or fix for the affected product line.
• Restrict and monitor local administrator access on systems running the affected IBM software.
• Minimize retention of sensitive material in process memory where operationally possible and follow vendor hardening guidance.
• Confirm whether any affected WebSphere eXtreme Scale versions (7.1.0, 7.1.1, 8.5, 8.6) are deployed and prioritize remediation on exposed instances.
• Validate remediation through change control and document the systems updated against this CVE.

Evidence notes

The source corpus identifies IBM as the vendor and links to an IBM PSIRT advisory reference plus a SecurityFocus advisory entry. NVD lists the weakness as CWE-200 and provides the CVSS 3.0 vector AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N. The published date used here is the CVE publication timestamp supplied in the corpus (2017-02-08T22:59:00.183Z).

Official resources