Exim: privilege escalation flaw under attack

What is affected

Exim is mostly run by companies, schools and public bodies, not on home computers. You are unlikely to have it yourself, but organisations that hold your data may. Breaches that start with flaws like this one are how personal data ends up leaked.

Exim allows local users to gain privileges by leveraging the ability of the exim user account to specify an alternate configuration file with a directive that contains arbitrary commands.

What an attacker can do

This is a privilege escalation flaw. It lets an attacker turn limited access into full administrator control. Attackers pair it with another flaw or a malicious file: once anything of theirs runs on the device, this bug lets it take over completely.

How it is reached

Needs access to the device or a file opened on it

Access the attacker needs

A basic user account

Does the victim have to do something?

No, works without the victim doing anything

What to do

1. At home: nothing to install. Keep your own devices updated and use a different password for every service, so that a breach at one organisation does not open your other accounts.
2. If you administer Exim at work: apply the vendor's fix or mitigation now and review logs for signs of compromise, because the flaw was being exploited before it was listed.
3. If the product is past its support date and no fix exists, take it off the internet or retire it.

Apply updates per vendor instructions.

How urgent is it

CISA added this vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogue on March 25, 2022, which means there is reliable evidence of attacks in the wild. US federal agencies must fix it by April 15, 2022, a deadline that has already passed. That deadline does not bind anyone else, but it shows how seriously the agency rates it.

The EPSS model estimates a 18% probability that this flaw will be exploited somewhere in the next 30 days. That is higher than 97% of all scored vulnerabilities.

Its CVSS severity score is 7.8 out of 10 (high), as recorded in the US National Vulnerability Database.

Technical description

Exim 4.72 and earlier allows local users to gain privileges by leveraging the ability of the exim user account to specify an alternate configuration file with a directive that contains arbitrary commands, as demonstrated by the spool_directory directive.