NordVPN 6.12.7.0 for Windows suffers from a SYSTEM privilege escalation vulnerability through the "nordvpn-service" service. This service establishes an NetNamedPipe endpoint that allows arbitrary installed applications to connect and call publicly exposed methods. The "Connect" method accepts a class instance argument that provides attacker control of the OpenVPN command line. An attacker can specify a dynamic library plugin that should run for every new VPN connection attempt. This plugin will execute code in the context of the SYSTEM user.

References

• https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2018-10170
• https://github.com/VerSprite/research/blob/master/advisories/VS-2018-018.md