Does anyone have visibility into the ongoing exploitation of the Zimbra vulnerability CVE-2024-45519? Seems like exploitation would be fairly easy if all that's required is sending a malformed email. Further, the ability to remotely execute code seems like this would heighten the severity level. One researcher describes the activity in the wild as "mass exploitation." Can @GossiTheDog and others provide a reality check regarding the ease, severity and volume of the exploitation?

@dangoodin @GossiTheDog The affected service is not enabled by default, this must have quite limited results anyway.

cc @iagox86 for the volume question

@dangoodin @swapgs @GossiTheDog I haven't spent any time on this, I think @h0wdy is working on creating a tag.

I took a very quick look at the data. We're seeing a single IP address spraying the exploit in the screenshot below. Some quick thoughts:

  • They're sending it to ports 25 and 10027 (?)
  • The payload doesn't actually do anything - it downloads a file (to stdout) but doesn't do anything with it
  • They've sent in the neighbourhood of ~500 requests to us starting around 9:20am UTC this morning and ending about an hour later
  • This isn't being routed through email, it's a direct connection to SMTP

That's all we've seen (so far), it doesn't really seem like a serious attack. I'll keep an eye on it, and see if they try anything else!

@dangoodin @swapgs @GossiTheDog @h0wdy I did a bunch of work on Zimbra last summer.. we reported on a bunch of different vulnerabilities, but we didn't see a lot of actual hits or deployments, and that was in services that were enabled by default.

I'm skeptical this will be a big deal

@dangoodin @swapgs @GossiTheDog @h0wdy Oh yeah, the big vuln last year, that CISA told us was under active exploit, was in memcached and was a pain to exploit.

I wanted to work on Zimbra more, their security seemed questionable, but we decided that they weren't popular enough.

That being said, CISA seemed oddly interested in Zimbra stuff.

https://www.rapid7.com/blog/post/2022/08/17/active-exploitation-of-multiple-vulnerabilities-in-zimbra-collaboration-suite/

Active Exploitation of Multiple Vulnerabilities in Zimbra Collaboration Suite | Rapid7 Blog

Five vulnerabilities affecting Zimbra Collaboration Suite have come to our attention, one that is unpatched and four that are actively being exploited.

Rapid7

@iagox86 @dangoodin @GossiTheDog @h0wdy Can’t speak for CISA but it’s very popular in Europe, mostly universities and government entities. Volexity and Google TAG also witnessed several 0-day campaigns.

But definitely not worth the dramatic coverage we’re seeing, looks like the CUPS debacle was not enough.

@iagox86 @dangoodin @GossiTheDog @h0wdy Hopefully Zimbra fixed all the LPEs this time ;D