CWE-359: Exposure of Private Personal Information to an Unauthorized Actor
low-riskThe product does not properly prevent a person's private, personal information from being accessed by actors who either (1) are not explicitly authorized to access the information or (2) do not have the implicit consent of the person about whom the information is collected.
Common Consequences
Detection Methods
Private personal data can enter a program in a variety of ways: Directly from the user in the form of a password or personal information Accessed from a database or other data store by the application Indirectly from a partner or other third party If the data is written to an external location - such as the console, file system, or network - a privacy violation may occur.
Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)
Tools are available to analyze documents (such as PDF, Word, etc.) to look for private information such as names, addresses, etc.
Real-World Examples (10)
| CVE | CVSS | EPSS | KEV |
|---|---|---|---|
| CVE-2022-0482 | 9.1 | 91.4% | — |
| CVE-2024-45591 | 5.3 | 86.2% | — |
| CVE-2024-11396 | 5.3 | 57.0% | — |
| CVE-2023-50719 | 7.5 | 51.1% | — |
| CVE-2025-34441 | 7.5 | 43.2% | — |
| CVE-2024-30056 | 7.1 | 9.7% | — |
| CVE-2022-24819 | 5.3 | 4.3% | — |
| CVE-2025-49715 | 7.5 | 2.0% | — |
| CVE-2023-36018 | 7.8 | 1.6% | — |
| CVE-2022-0155 | 6.5 | 1.3% | — |