Qualys discovered that needrestart, before version 3.8, passes unsanitized data to a library (Modules::ScanDeps) which expects safe input. This could allow a local attacker to execute arbitrary shell commands. Please see the related CVE-2024-10224 in Modules::ScanDeps.

Qualys discovered that if unsanitized input was used with the library Modules::ScanDeps, before version 1.36 a local attacker could possibly execute arbitrary shell commands by open()ing a "pesky pipe" (such as passing "commands|" as a filename) or by passing arbitrary strings to eval().