Hackers Exploiting Unpatched RCE Flaw in Zimbra Collaboration Suite

A significant distant code execution vulnerability in Zimbra’s enterprise collaboration program and email system is getting actively exploited, with no patch at present obtainable to remediate the issue.

The shortcoming, assigned CVE-2022-41352, carries a critical-severity ranking of CVSS 9.8, furnishing a pathway for attackers to add arbitrary information and have out malicious actions on afflicted installations.

“The vulnerability is because of to the approach (cpio) in which Zimbra’s antivirus engine (Amavis) scans inbound email messages,” cybersecurity agency Swift7 stated in an analysis published this week.

The issue is mentioned to have been abused since early September 2022, according to details shared on Zimbra boards. Though a take care of is yet to be introduced, Zimbra is urging consumers to install the “pax” utility and restart the Zimbra companies.

“If the pax deal is not set up, Amavis will fall-back to working with cpio, regretably the tumble-again is carried out inadequately (by Amavis) and will make it possible for an unauthenticated attacker to produce and overwrite data files on the Zimbra server, like the Zimbra webroot,” the business stated very last month.

The vulnerability, which is existing in variations 8.8.15 and 9. of the software, influences a number of Linux distributions this sort of as Oracle Linux 8, Pink Hat Organization Linux 8, Rocky Linux 8, and CentOS 8, with the exception of Ubuntu owing to the simple fact that pax is previously mounted by default.

A effective exploitation of the flaw involves an attacker to email an archive file (CPIO or TAR) to a prone server, which is then inspected by Amavis applying the cpio file archiver utility to extract its contents.

“Considering the fact that cpio has no manner the place it can be securely employed on untrusted documents, the attacker can publish to any route on the filesystem that the Zimbra person can entry,” Immediate7 researcher Ron Bowes reported. “The most probably final result is for the attacker to plant a shell in the web root to acquire remote code execution, whilst other avenues probably exist.”

Zimbra stated it expects the vulnerability to be dealt with in the next Zimbra patch, which will take out the dependency on cpio and as an alternative make pax a prerequisite. Nonetheless, it has not made available a particular timeframe by when the repair will be obtainable.

Speedy7 also famous that CVE-2022-41352 is “properly similar” to CVE-2022-30333, a path traversal flaw in the Unix version of RARlab’s unRAR utility which arrived to light-weight before this June, the only change being that the new flaw leverages CPIO and TAR archive formats as a substitute of RAR.

Even additional troublingly, Zimbra is mentioned to be additional susceptible to yet another zero-day privilege escalation flaw, which could be chained with the cpio zero-day to reach distant root compromise of the servers.

The fact that Zimbra has been a well known focus on for menace actors is by no suggests new. In August, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned of adversaries exploiting various flaws in the software package to breach networks.

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Some pieces of this report are sourced from:
thehackernews.com