CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2022-0280 — Microsoft Windows security vulnerability
High
CVSS 7.5
A race condition vulnerability exists in the QuickClean feature of McAfee Total Protection for Windows prior to 16.0.43 that allows a local user to gain privilege elevation and perform an arbitrary file delete. This could lead to sensitive files being deleted and potentially cause denial of service. This attack exploits the way symlinks are created and how the product works with them.
- Severity
- High
- CVSS
- 7.5 (3.1)
- Published
- 2022-03-10
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- windows/system
- Weaknesses
- CWE-367
Affected products
- microsoft / windows
Matched remediation archetype
Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization
This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.
Check exposure
- Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
- Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
- Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.
Remediate safely
- Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
- Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
- Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.
Authoritative sources
Complete CVE record and remediation plan
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