Trend Micro Apex Central RCE PoC Released (CVE-2025-69258)

A critical security update has been issued by Trend Micro for its Apex Central on-premise management platform, addressing multiple vulnerabilities that could be exploited by remote attackers without requiring authentication. The most severe of these flaws, tracked as CVE-2025-69258, enables unauthenticated code execution with the highest system privileges, posing a significant risk to organizations using the software for centralized security management.

Researchers from Tenable discovered and privately reported these security issues last year. They have now publicly released technical analyses and proof-of-concept exploit code for all three vulnerabilities. This development increases the urgency for administrators to apply the available patch.

The Apex Central on-premise solution serves as a central hub for IT and security teams. It is used to manage, configure, and monitor an organization’s entire suite of Trend Micro security products across gateways, mail servers, file servers, and corporate desktops. The platform and its associated SQL database are installed on an organization’s own hardware or virtual machines, meaning any compromise could have widespread internal consequences.

The standout threat is CVE-2025-69258, which allows an unauthenticated attacker to load a malicious DLL file into the platform’s MsgReceiver.exe process. Successful exploitation results in arbitrary code running with SYSTEM-level privileges, granting an attacker complete control over the affected server. The other two flaws, CVE-2025-69259 and CVE-2025-69260, can also be triggered by unauthenticated actors sending a crafted message to the same process. However, these typically result in a denial-of-service condition, crashing the service rather than enabling code execution.

All three vulnerabilities involve the MsgReceiver.exe component, which listens on TCP port 20001 by default. Trend Micro has resolved the issues in Apex Central (on-premise) Critical Patch Build 7190. The company states that all prior releases are vulnerable and strongly urges customers to install this update immediately to secure their environments.

In its advisory, Trend Micro noted that exploiting such flaws generally requires an attacker to have some form of access to a vulnerable machine. Alongside prompt patching, the company recommends that organizations review remote access policies for critical systems and ensure perimeter security controls are current. While there are no current reports of these specific vulnerabilities being actively exploited in the wild, the public release of functional proof-of-concept code changes the landscape. It is anticipated that threat actors will begin scanning the internet for unpatched, publicly accessible instances of Apex Central.

For any organization relying on this central management platform, applying the Critical Patch Build 7190 is not a task for later consideration. It is an urgent operational priority to prevent potential network-wide compromise. Delaying this update exposes the management infrastructure of an organization’s entire security product suite to significant risk.

(Source: HelpNet Security)