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Mallory
HighPublic exploit

Local Privilege Escalation via Insecure Service Binary Permissions in AspEmail 5.6.0.2 (EmailAgent)

IdentifiersCVE-2023-53949CWE-732· Incorrect Permission Assignment…

AspEmail 5.6.0.2 contains a local privilege escalation vulnerability caused by incorrect permission assignment on a critical resource: the BIN directory and/or service binary used by the Persits Software EmailAgent service. Because local users have full write permissions to the BIN directory, an attacker can replace the EmailAgent service executable with a malicious binary. When the service is started (or restarted), the malicious replacement executes in the service’s security context, resulting in elevated system-level access.

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Impact, mitigation & remediation

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Impact

What an attacker gets, and what they’ve been doing with it.

A local attacker can escalate privileges to elevated/system-level access by replacing the Persits Software EmailAgent service executable and having it executed by the service manager. This can enable full compromise of the host, including arbitrary code execution with high privileges, tampering with system configuration, and access to sensitive data available to the elevated context.

Mitigation

If you can’t patch tonight, do this now.

Restrict/repair filesystem ACLs on the AspEmail BIN directory and the Persits Software EmailAgent service executable to remove write/modify permissions for non-admin users/groups. Monitor for unexpected changes to the service binary (e.g., file integrity monitoring) and for service restarts that could trigger execution of a replaced binary. Limit local access to the host where feasible.

Remediation

Patch, then assume compromise.

Apply vendor-provided updates for AspEmail that correct the insecure permissions. Ensure the Persits Software EmailAgent service executable and its containing BIN directory are owned and ACL’d such that only Administrators/SYSTEM (or an appropriate trusted service account) have write/modify permissions, and unprivileged users do not have write access.
PUBLIC EXPLOITS

Exploits

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VALID 0 / 0 TOTALView more in app

No public exploit code observed for this vulnerability.

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Detection signatures

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