Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a high-severity security flaw in the PostgreSQL open-source database system that could allow unprivileged users to alter environment variables, and potentially lead to code execution or information disclosure.The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-10979, carries a CVSS score of 8.8.Environment variables are user-defined values that can allow a program to dynamically fetch various kinds of information, such as access keys and software installation paths, during runtime without having to hard-code them. In certain operating systems, they are initialized during the startup phase.