Cybersecurity researchers have revealed details of a security flaw in the Roundcube webmail software that can be used to execute malicious JavaScript in a victim’s web browser and steal sensitive account information under certain circumstances.
“When a victim views a malicious Roundcube email sent by an attacker, the attacker can execute arbitrary JavaScript in the victim’s browser,” Cybersecurity firm Sonar said in an analysis published this week.
“Attackers could exploit the vulnerability to steal a victim’s email, contacts, and email password, and send emails from the victim’s account.”
Following a responsible disclosure on June 18, 2024, three vulnerabilities were exposed addressed in Roundcube versions 1.6.8 and 1.5.8 released on August 4, 2024.
The list of vulnerabilities is as follows –
- CVE-2024-42008 – Cross-site scripting error via a malicious email attachment with an unsafe Content-Type header
- CVE-2024-42009 – Cross-site scripting error resulting from post-processing of sanitized HTML content
- CVE-2024-42010 – Lack of disclosure caused by insufficient CSS filtering
Successful exploitation of the above flaws could allow unauthenticated attackers to steal emails and contacts, and send emails from the victim’s account, but only after viewing a specially crafted email in Roundcube.
“Attackers can persistently anchor themselves in a victim’s browser across reboots, allowing them to continuously steal the victim’s email or password the next time they log in,” said security researcher Oscar Zeino-Mahmalat.
“A successful attack to exploit the critical XSS vulnerability (CVE-2024-42009) requires no user interaction other than viewing the attacker’s email. The exploit requires one click from the victim to work. , but an attacker can make this interaction invisible to the user.”
Additional technical details about the issues have been withheld to give users time to upgrade to the latest version, and in light of the fact that webmail software has been found to be vulnerable repeatedly exploited by nation-state entities, as APT28, Winter Wyvernand TEG-70.
These findings come after details emerged about the lack of local escalation of maximum severity privileges in РаспАп open source project (CVE-2024-41637, CVSS score: 10.0), which allows an attacker to ascend to root and execute several important commands. The vulnerability was fixed in version 3.1.5.
“The user www-data has write access to the restapi.service file and also has sudo permission to run several critical commands without a password,” – a security researcher who goes by the internet alias 0xZon1 said. “This combination of permissions allows an attacker to modify the service to execute arbitrary code with root privileges, extending their access from www-data to root.”
