Home/CWE/External Control of System or Configuration Setting
Weakness

External Control of System or Configuration Setting

CWE-15 · Base · Incomplete

One or more system settings or configuration elements can be externally controlled by a user.

Extended description

Allowing external control of system settings can disrupt service or cause an application to behave in unexpected, and potentially malicious ways.

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Weakness Relationships

Where this weakness sits in the CWE hierarchy. Walk up to broader classes or down to more specific variants.
Parent of this (broader)
ChildOfCWE-20 · Improper Input Validation
ChildOfCWE-610 · Externally Controlled Reference to a Resource in Another Sphere
ChildOfCWE-642 · External Control of Critical State Data
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Attack Patterns (CAPEC)

10
How adversaries exploit this weakness, per MITRE CAPEC.
CAPEC-13Subverting Environment Variable Values
CAPEC-146XML Schema Poisoning
CAPEC-176Configuration/Environment Manipulation
CAPEC-203Manipulate Registry Information
CAPEC-270Modification of Registry Run Keys
CAPEC-271Schema Poisoning
CAPEC-579Replace Winlogon Helper DLL
CAPEC-69Target Programs with Elevated Privileges
CAPEC-76Manipulating Web Input to File System Calls
CAPEC-77Manipulating User-Controlled Variables
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CVEs With This Weakness

60
A sample of the 60 CVEs tagged with this weakness.
CVECVE-2026-43531
CVECVE-2026-41489
CVECVE-2026-41384
CVECVE-2026-41294
CVECVE-2026-35650
CVECVE-2026-33092
CVECVE-2026-30817
CVECVE-2026-30816
CVECVE-2026-27203
CVECVE-2026-22750
CVECVE-2026-22708
CVECVE-2026-22177
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Nuclei Scanner Templates

3
Open-source Nuclei templates that detect this weakness class - an actionable scan-for-it pivot. Licensed under the ProjectDiscovery / Nuclei terms.
criticalJolokia file write to RCE jfr
criticalApache Solr 9.1 - Remote Code Execution
unknownSymfony _fragment - Detect
External lookups - second-class, for what we don’t hold ourselves
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