Overview
Paragon Partition Manager's BioNTdrv.sys driver, versions prior to 2.0.0, contains five vulnerabilities. These include arbitrary kernel memory mapping and write vulnerabilities, a null pointer dereference, insecure kernel resource access, and an arbitrary memory move vulnerability. An attacker with local access to a device can exploit these vulnerabilities to escalate privileges or cause a denial-of-service (DoS) scenario on the victim's machine. Additionally, as the attack involves a Microsoft-signed Driver, an attacker can leverage a Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver (BYOVD) technique to exploit systems even if Paragon Partition Manager is not installed. Microsoft has observed threat actors (TAs) exploiting this weakness in BYOVD ransomware attacks, specifically using CVE-2025-0289 to achieve privilege escalation to SYSTEM level, then execute further malicious code. These vulnerabilities have been patched by both Paragon Software, and vulnerable BioNTdrv.sys versions blocked by Microsoft's Vulnerable Driver Blocklist.
Description
Paragon Partition Manager is a software tool from Paragon Software, available in both Community and Commercial versions, that allows users to manage partitions (individual sections) on a hard drive. Paragon Partition Manager uses a kernel-level Driver distributed as BioNTdrv.sys. The driver allows for a low-level access to the hard drive with elevated privileges to access and manage data as the kernel device.
Microsoft researchers have identified four vulnerabilities in Paragon Partition Manager version 7.9.1 and a fifth specific vulnerability (CVE-2025-0289) affecting version 17. These vulnerabilities, particularly in BioNTdrv.sys versions 1.3.0 and 1.5.1, allow attackers to achieve SYSTEM-level privilege escalation, which surpasses typical administrator permissions. The vulnerabilities also enable attackers to manipulate the driver via device-specific Input/Output Control (IOCTL) calls, potentially ..
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