CVE-2005-3242: Ethereal 0.10.12 and earlier allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) via unknown vecto...

Security readout for executives and security teams

CVE-2005-3242 is a denial-of-service issue in Ethereal 0.10.12 and earlier. A remote attacker could crash the analyzer through malformed traffic affecting IrDA or SMB protocol parsing. The sources do not indicate data theft, code execution, or active exploitation. Exposure is most likely on systems still running Ethereal 0.10.12 or earlier, especially where analysts process untrusted captures or live traffic containing IrDA or SMB data. Modern environments using supported packet-analysis tooling may have limited exposure. Treat this as a legacy-tool resilience issue. It can disrupt analysts or monitoring workflows but the provided evidence does not show code execution or active exploitation. Prioritize remediation where old Ethereal is still used on untrusted traffic. Mitigation focus: Identify and retire Ethereal 0.10.12 or earlier installations.; Apply vendor or distribution updates referenced by affected package advisories.; Avoid analyzing untrusted captures with vulnerable Ethereal versions..

Prepared

Jun 29, 2026, 17:15 UTC (UTC+00:00)

Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.