Threadlinqs IntelligenceStart free

Weakness · BaseCWE-359

CWE-359: Exposure of Private Personal Information to an Unauthorized Actor

Base

As of 2026-10-05, CWE-359 (Exposure of Private Personal Information to an Unauthorized Actor) underlies 4 CVEs tracked by Threadlinqs, none of them in the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, and is cited by 17 tracked threats.

CVEs
4Mapped to CWE-359
CISA KEV
0None listed yet
Critical
0CVSS v3 critical CVEs
Threats
17Tracked campaigns citing it
Likelihood
—MITRE likelihood of exploit

Last updated:

What is CWE-359?

The 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.

CWE-359 is a base-level weakness in MITRE’s Common Weakness Enumeration. Applicable platforms: Language: Not Language-Specific; Technology: Mobile.

Source: MITRE CWE (CWE-359 definition, reproduced verbatim). Counts and linkage below are Threadlinqs data.

Consequences

  • Confidentiality — Read Application Data

Source: MITRE CWE, common consequences.

How CWE-359 is exploited in the wild

Threadlinqs maps 4 CVEs to CWE-359, published between 2026-04-22 and 2026-09-16. None of them is in the CISA KEV catalog yet. By CVSS v3 severity the set splits into 1 high, 2 medium. The highest EPSS score in the set is 0.3% (CVE-2026-62328), the modelled probability of exploitation in the next 30 days. 17 tracked threats reference CWE-359 directly or through a CVE it covers; the most recent is “Poper Blocker Chrome Extension Spyware: Big Star Labs' 'Featured' Ad Blocker Exfiltrates Browsing History, Screenshots, and AI Chatbot Conversations From Millions” (2026-09-28). Affected products concentrate in Apple (1), angular (1), decolua (1), among 4 vendors in total.

Vulnerabilities (CVEs)

All 4 CVEs mapped to CWE-359, CISA KEV first, then by CVSS score.

Affected vendors

  • Apple — 1 CVE
  • angular — 1 CVE
  • decolua — 1 CVE
  • djust-org — 1 CVE

Threat activity

17 tracked threats cite CWE-359:

Mitigations

  • Requirements: Identify and consult all relevant regulations for personal privacy. An organization may be required to comply with certain federal and state regulations, depending on its location, the type of business it conducts, and the nature of any private data it handles. Regulations may include Safe Harbor Privacy Framework [REF-340], Gramm-Leach Bliley Act (GLBA) [REF-341], Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) [REF-342], General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) [REF-1047], California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) [REF-1048], and others.
  • Architecture and Design: Carefully evaluate how secure design may interfere with privacy, and vice versa. Security and privacy concerns often seem to compete with each other. From a security perspective, all important operations should be recorded so that any anomalous activity can later be identified. However, when private data is involved, this practice can in fact create risk. Although there are many ways in which private data can be handled unsafely, a common risk stems from misplaced trust. Programmers often trust the operating environment in which a program runs, and therefore believe that it is acceptable store private information on the file system, in the registry, or in other locally-controlled resources…
  • Implementation, Operation / Attack Surface Reduction: Some tools can automatically analyze documents to redact, strip, or "sanitize" private information, although some human review might be necessary. Tools may vary in terms of which document formats can be processed. When calling an external program to automatically generate or convert documents, invoke the program with any available options that avoid generating sensitive metadata. Some formats have well-defined fields that could contain private data, such as Exchangeable image file format (Exif), which can contain potentially sensitive metadata such as geolocation, date, and time [REF-1515] [REF-1516].

Source: MITRE CWE, potential mitigations.

Detection methods (MITRE CWE)

  • Architecture or Design Review (effectiveness: High): 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 (effectiveness: High): 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.)
  • Automated Static Analysis: Tools are available to analyze documents (such as PDF, Word, etc.) to look for private information such as names, addresses, etc.

Source: MITRE CWE, detection methods. Threadlinqs detection rules for the threats above are Blue tier and higher.