The Wireshark development team has fixed three serious flaws that could be exploited by a remote unauthenticated attacker to trigger a DoS condition in the world’s most popular network protocol analyzer.

“To exploit the vulnerability, the attacker may use misleading language and instructions to convince a user to open a malicious packet trace file.” reads the security advisory published for the CVE-2018-16057 flaw.

“To inject malformed packets that the Wireshark application may attempt to parse, the attacker may need access to the trusted, internal network where the targeted system resides. This access requirement may reduce the likelihood of a successful exploit.”

Anyway, to trigger the flaw it is necessary to access to a malicious packet trace file, a circumstance that makes the likelihood of exploitation very low.

Wireshark users need to upgrade their install to one of these: 2.6.3, 2.4.9, or 2.2.17.

Below the list of safeguards provided by Cisco in the security advisory: