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PHPMailer Sendmail Argument Injection

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PHPMailer Sendmail Argument Injection

Disclosed
12/26/2016
Created
05/30/2018

Description

PHPMailer versions up to and including 5.2.19 are affected by a vulnerability which can be leveraged by an attacker to write a file with partially controlled contents to an arbitrary location through injection of arguments that are passed to the sendmail binary. This module writes a payload to the web root of the webserver before then executing it with an HTTP request. The user running PHPMailer must have write access to the specified WEB_ROOT directory and successful exploitation can take a few minutes.

Author(s)

  • Dawid Golunski
  • Spencer McIntyre

Platform

PHP

Architectures

php

Development

Module Options

To display the available options, load the module within the Metasploit console and run the commands 'show options' or 'show advanced':

msf > use exploit/multi/http/phpmailer_arg_injection
msf exploit(phpmailer_arg_injection) > show targets
    ...targets...
msf exploit(phpmailer_arg_injection) > set TARGET < target-id >
msf exploit(phpmailer_arg_injection) > show options
    ...show and set options...
msf exploit(phpmailer_arg_injection) > exploit

Time is precious, so I don’t want to do something manually that I can automate. Leveraging the Metasploit Framework when automating any task keeps us from having to re-create the wheel as we can use the existing libraries and focus our efforts where it matters.

– Jim O’Gorman | President, Offensive Security

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