CriticalCVE-2019-10068

    Kentico Xperience Deserialization of Untrusted Data Vulnerability (CVE-2019-10068)

    Published In CISA KEV since Sources: CVE.org

    What is affected, what to do

    An unauthenticated attacker can achieve remote code execution (RCE) due to a failure in validating security headers in Kentico Xperience. This occurs through deserialization of user-controlled .NET objects after bypassing initial authentication. The affected versions are 9.0.0 to 9.0.51, 10.0.0 to 10.0.52, 11.0.0 to 11.0.48, and 12.0.0 to 12.0.15. Since the vulnerability is actively exploited, it is imperative to update to versions 9.0.52, 10.0.53, 11.0.49, or 12.0.16 immediately.

    The vulnerability is being actively exploited; treat it as a priority. Update Kentico Xperience to version 10.0.52, Kentico Xperience to version 11.0.48, Kentico Xperience to version 12.0.15. Immediate actions, mitigation and detection rules are in the runbook below.

    Affected
    • Kentico Xperience lte 9.0.0..9.0.51
    • Kentico Xperience lt 10.0.0..10.0.52
    • Kentico Xperience lt 11.0.0..11.0.48
    • Kentico Xperience lt 12.0.0..12.0.15
    Fixed in
    • Kentico Xperience 10.0.52
    • Kentico Xperience 11.0.48
    • Kentico Xperience 12.0.15

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    Metrics

    9.8

    Priority

    XIEM Effective CVSS: highest available CVSS rating from NVD and vendor data.

    Source: NVD, CVSS v3

    9.8

    CVSS v3

    Severity Critical on the scale from 0 to 10.

    Source: CVE.org

    95.1 %

    EPSS score

    High — model estimates ≥ 50% chance of real-world exploitation within 30 days.

    Source: FIRST EPSS, percentile 99.86

    Show all metrics
    Severity
    Critical
    Priority (0–325)

    The priority score is a consolidated metric that condenses several individual signals into a single, action-guiding ranking: technical severity (CVSS), exploitation likelihood (EPSS), known-exploited status (KEV) and the context of the affected asset. The aim is to answer the only truly important question in vulnerability management: what first?

    Read in glossary
    228.78 Methodology
    Exploit maturity

    An exploit is code or a technique that specifically uses a concrete vulnerability to force unintended behaviour — such as executing code or escalating privileges. It is the tool that turns a theoretical flaw into a practical attack.

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    actively exploited
    XIEM Effective CVSS

    XIEM® is the tiered managed-security operating model from NEOSEC and a registered trademark of NEOSEC GmbH. It extends classic SIEM — the central collection, normalisation and correlation of security-relevant events — with endpoint forensics, network visibility and deception technology, and consolidates them into three building tiers: Sentry, Orchestrate and Command.

    Read in glossary
    9.8 Methodology
    CVSS v3

    CVSS is the globally established, open standard for assessing the technical severity of a vulnerability on a scale from 0 to 10. It describes how easily a flaw can be exploited and what damage it can cause — but not how likely its actual exploitation is. CVSS and the complementary EPSS deliberately answer different questions.

    Read in glossary
    9.8
    EPSS score

    The EPSS score is the absolute model output for an individual vulnerability: the estimated probability of real-world exploitation within the next 30 days, expressed as a value between 0 and 1 (i.e. 0 % to 100 %). A score of 0.42 means „the model estimates a 42 % chance of real-world exploitation within 30 days“.

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    95.1 %
    High — model estimates ≥ 50% chance of real-world exploitation within 30 days.
    EPSS percentile

    The EPSS percentile is the relative position of a vulnerability within all EPSS-scored CVEs, expressed as a value between 0 and 1. A percentile of 0.90 means „this CVE has a higher EPSS score than 90 % of all other scored CVEs“. Unlike the EPSS score, it is not a probability — but a positioning within a ranking.

    Read in glossary
    99.86
    Critical — this CVE ranks in the top fifth of all CVEs scored today (rank ≥ 80%).
    KEV status

    The KEV catalogue is a list maintained by the US authority CISA of vulnerabilities for which active exploitation in the wild has been confirmed. It answers not the question „how severe?“ but „is it already being attacked?“ — thereby sharply prioritising patching.

    Read in glossary
    Actively exploited
    Published
    In CISA KEV since

    The KEV catalogue is a list maintained by the US authority CISA of vulnerabilities for which active exploitation in the wild has been confirmed. It answers not the question „how severe?“ but „is it already being attacked?“ — thereby sharply prioritising patching.

    Read in glossary
    CISA assessment (SSVC)
    Exploitation: active · automatable · Technical impact: total
    Source: CISA Vulnrichment, as of 7 February 2025
    CWE

    CWE is a catalogue of typical weakness types in software and hardware — such as flawed input validation, unsafe memory handling or poor authentication. Where a CVE names a concrete vulnerability in a concrete product, a CWE describes the underlying class of defect.

    Read in glossary
    CWE-502

    Response and mitigation

    Why act now?

    Prioritisation rationale

    This CVE sits on KEV because it is network-reachable, requires no authentication, and chains directly into .NET deserialisation RCE under the IIS AppPool identity — the CVSS vector is at the top of the scale and EPSS places it among the vulnerabilities most likely to be exploited. Public exploit tooling for the gadget chain has been available since 2019 and is routinely used for initial access, webshell deployment and pivoting into the internal network. Treat any internet-exposed Kentico instance as P1/critical and patch internal instances within 72 hours, since staging-service access from an insider or a compromised adjacent host is enough. CISA does not flag it for known ransomware use, but a foothold on a CMS server is a textbook staging point for extortion operations against the content and customer data that sits behind it.

    1. Runbook step 1

      Immediate response (0-24 h)

      • Upgrade Kentico Xperience to a patched build: 12.0.15, 11.0.48 or 10.0.52. The 9.x branch has no fix — plan migration to a supported branch and take the instance offline or hard-isolate it in the meantime.
      • Audit the Content Staging / Sync Server endpoint, typically /CMSPages/Staging/SyncServer.asmx and /CMSPages/Staging/*. If it is reachable from the internet, block it at the perimeter firewall or reverse proxy immediately.
      • Triage every Kentico web server for compromise: review w3wp.exe process trees, enumerate new .aspx/.ashx/.asmx files under CMS\, App_Data\ and CMSSiteUtils\Import\ since January 2019, inspect scheduled tasks and loaded IIS modules.
      • Rotate the IIS AppPool service account and tighten it to least privilege. If a domain account is used, invalidate Kerberos tickets on adjacent hosts (klist purge) and consider a KRBTGT reset if lateral movement is suspected.
      • Regenerate the Kentico staging shared secret and server keys — the authentication headers that gated the staging service were not reliably validated.
      • Raise a P1 incident ticket; if you fall under NIS2, prepare the early-warning notification to the competent national authority.

    2. Runbook step 2

      Mitigation layers

      • Network segmentation: place the Kentico web tier in a dedicated DMZ VLAN, allow egress only to required backends (SQL 1433, SMTP), and block generic internet egress to break reverse-shell and second-stage payload retrieval.
      • WAF in front of IIS: block or alert on POST requests to /CMSPages/Staging/* and any *.asmx carrying SOAP bodies that mention serialised .NET gadgets (ObjectDataProvider, XamlReader, TypeConfuseDelegate, ObjectStateFormatter).
      • IIS hardening: enforce a request-filtering content-length cap, regenerate machineKey, confirm enableViewStateMac=true, disable trace and detailed error pages.
      • IAM: scope the Kentico SQL login to db_datareader/db_datawriter only, never sysadmin. The AppPool identity must not be a local admin; review SeImpersonatePrivilege carefully because of Potato-style privilege escalation.
      • Endpoint hardening: enable an EDR rule that blocks or at minimum alerts on w3wp.exe spawning cmd.exe, powershell.exe, csc.exe or rundll32.exe; enforce AMSI for PowerShell.
      • Snapshot the Kentico instance and SQL database before patching (for forensics) and redeploy from a trusted source baseline afterwards.

    3. Runbook step 3

      Detection rules

      • IIS access logs (W3C): POST to /CMSPages/Staging/SyncServer.asmx or /CMSPages/Staging/* with unusually large cs-bytes (>10 KB) and a user-agent that does not match known deployment tools. KQL shape: W3CIISLog | where csUriStem contains "Staging" and csMethod == "POST" and csBytes > 10000.
      • Sysmon EID 1 (Process Create): w3wp.exe as parent of cmd.exe, powershell.exe, cscript.exe, net.exe, whoami.exe. Sigma shape: parent_image: '*\\w3wp.exe' with image: '*\\(cmd|powershell|whoami|net)\\.exe'.
      • Sysmon EID 11 (File Create): new .aspx, .ashx, .asmx or .dll written under the Kentico web root (CMS\, CMSPages\, App_Code\) outside a scheduled deployment window — a classic webshell indicator.
      • Windows Security 4688 or EDR command-line telemetry: decoding and download patterns (FromBase64String, IEX, Invoke-WebRequest, certutil -urlcache) executed under the IIS AppPool user identity.
      • Network (Zeek/Suricata): outbound connections from the web server to non-whitelisted destinations on 80/443/4444/8080 immediately after a POST to the staging endpoint; Suricata rule idea on SOAP bodies containing the BinaryFormatter header marker (AAEAAAD/////).

    Detection rules

    No NEOSEC detection rule is available for this vulnerability yet.

    Classification under NIS2 and CRA

    Rule-based classification from exploitation status and severity. It does not replace a case-by-case assessment.

    NIS2

    NIS2 is EU Directive (EU) 2022/2555 to raise the level of cybersecurity across the Union. It substantially broadens obligations compared with the first NIS directive: more sectors, mandatory risk management, staged reporting duties and personal accountability of senior management.

    Read in glossary
    Actively exploited: treat the vulnerability as a priority in vulnerability handling under Art. 21(2)(e) NIS2. If it is exploited in your environment, check the reporting obligation under Art. 23 (early warning within 24 hours).
    CRA

    The CRA is EU Regulation (EU) 2024/2847 setting horizontal cybersecurity requirements for „products with digital elements“ — from industrial controllers and software to connected consumer devices. For the first time manufacturers must ensure security across the entire product lifecycle, handle vulnerabilities and provide security updates.

    Read in glossary
    Since 11.09.2026, manufacturers of affected products with digital elements must report actively exploited vulnerabilities under Art. 14 CRA, with an early warning within 24 hours via ENISA's single reporting platform.
    ISO/IEC 27001

    ISO/IEC 27001 is the internationally leading standard for an information security management system (ISMS). It describes a risk-based, process-oriented framework to systematically plan, implement, review and improve information security.

    Read in glossary
    Control A.8.8, management of technical vulnerabilities: assess relevance to your systems, plan remediation and keep evidence.

    Description

    An issue was discovered in Kentico 12.0.x before 12.0.15, 11.0.x before 11.0.48, 10.0.x before 10.0.52, and 9.x versions. Due to a failure to validate security headers, it was possible for a specially crafted request to the staging service to bypass the initial authentication and proceed to deserialize user-controlled .NET object input. This deserialization then led to unauthenticated remote code execution on the server where the Kentico instance was hosted.

    Source: cvelistv5, CISA KEV Catalog, NVD (NIST)

    Affected products

    The following versions are affected. Older releases of the same product line are also vulnerable unless stated otherwise.

    Affected products
    Affected versionsFixed in
    kenticoxperience
    • 10.0.0 – < 10.0.52
    • 11.0.0 – < 11.0.48
    • 12.0.0 – < 12.0.15
    • 9.0.0 – ≤ 9.0.51
    • 10.0.52
    • 11.0.48
    • 12.0.15
    • —

    Vendors and products

    Weakness classes (CWE)

    • CWE-502Deserialization of Untrusted Data

      Base

      The product deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently ensuring that the resulting data will be valid.

      Entry at MITRE CWE-502

    Public exploit references

    Publicly reported proof-of-concepts, exploit modules and detection templates for this vulnerability. NEOSEC links to the original sources only and does not provide any exploit code.

    Public exploit references
    CISA KEV CatalogCISA Known Exploited Vulnerability (opens in a new tab)cisa.govactively exploited
    Packet StormKentico CMS 12.0.14 Remote Command Execution (opens in a new tab)packetstormsecurity.comPoC (publicly reported)reported, not verified—

    References & sources

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