Patch now! Roundcube mail servers are being actively exploited

The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added a vulnerability in Roundcube Webmail to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. This means that Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies need to remediate this vulnerability by March 4, 2024, in order to protect their devices against active threats. We urge other Roundcube Webmail users to take this seriously too.

Roundcube is a web-based IMAP email client. Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is used for receiving email. It allows users to access their emails from multiple different devices, and it’s why when you read an email on your laptop it’s marked as “read” on your phone too. Reportedly, there are over 132,000 Roundcube servers accessible over the internet. Most of them situated in the US and China.

The affected versions are Roundcube versions before 1.4.14, 1.5.x before 1.5.4, and 1.6.x before 1.6.3. An update to patch the vulnerability with version 1.6.3 has been available since September 15, 2023. The current version, 1.6.6 at the time of writing, does not have the vulnerability either.

The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database lists publicly disclosed computer security flaws. The CVE patched in these updates is:

CVE-2023-43770, which is a persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) bug that lets attackers access restricted information.

XSS vulnerabilities occur when input coming into web applications is not validated and/or output to the browser is not properly escaped before being displayed. Persistent, or stored XSS, is a type of vulnerability which occurs when the untrusted or unverified user input is stored on a target server.

This means that a persistent XSS attack is possible when the attacker exploits a vulnerable website or web application to inject malicious code, and this code is stored on a server so it will later automatically be served to other users who visit the web page.

In this case it appears that attackers can send plain text emails to Roundcube users with XSS links in them, but Roundcube does not sanitize the links, and, of course, stores the email, creating persistence.

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