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Critical CVSS 9.8

CVE-2021-32086

Quest Kace Systems Management Appliance

An issue was discovered in Quest KACE Systems Deployment Appliance (SMA) 11.0.273. It uses a hardcoded symmetric encryption key to encrypt secrets in the MySQL databases. (This key is not unique for each installation.) An attacker that gains access to the MySQL server or a backup files can decrypt the secrets. Often, the decrypted secrets can be used to escalate privileges within KACE, or gain privileged access to unrelated systems or services.

What this means

Exposure
Exploitable remotely over the network, without authentication and with no action from the victim.
Impact
An attacker can read sensitive data, modify or destroy data and take the service offline.
Likelihood
Its EPSS score stays low: nothing points to imminent exploitation, which is no reason to leave it unpatched.

What to doPatch without waiting for the next scheduled cycle. Start with the instances exposed to the internet.

Read automatically from the CVSS vector, the weakness type (CWE) and the EPSS score. The technical description above remains the one published by NIST.

Published
27 July 2026
CVSS
9.8 (v3.1) CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
EPSS
0.19% probability of exploitation within 30 days · above 9% of all CVEs
Weakness
CWE-321
Sources
nvd
References

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