Execution with Unnecessary Privileges vulnerability in the Pager agent of multi-agent notification feature in Mitsubishi Electric Iconics Digital Solutions GENESIS64 prior to 10.97.3, Mitsubishi Electric GENESIS64 all versions and Mitsubishi Electric MC Works64 all versions allows a local authenticated attacker to make an unauthorized write to arbitrary files, by creating a symbolic link from a file used as a write destination by the services of the affected products to a target file. This could allow the attacker to destroy the file on a PC with the affected products installed, resulting in a denial-of-service (DoS) condition on the PC if the destroyed file is necessary for the operation of the PC.
The product performs an operation at a privilege level that is higher than the minimum level required, which creates new weaknesses or amplifies the consequences of other weaknesses.
New weaknesses can be exposed because running with extra privileges, such as root or Administrator, can disable the normal security checks being performed by the operating system or surrounding environment. Other pre-existing weaknesses can turn into security vulnerabilities if they occur while operating at raised privileges. Privilege management functions can behave in some less-than-obvious ways, and they have different quirks on different platforms. These inconsistencies are particularly pronounced if you are transitioning from one non-root user to another. Signal handlers and spawned processes run at the privilege of the owning process, so if a process is running as root when a signal fires or a sub-process is executed, the signal handler or sub-process will operate with root privileges.