A critical severity vulnerability present in multiple versions of the Exim mail software makes it possible for root access by attackers and executing commands on mail servers for some non-default server configurations.
The flaw impacts Exim versions 4.87 to 4.91 and it is caused by the improper validation of recipient addresses in the deliver_message() function in /src/deliver.c which leads to RCE with root privileges on the mail server.
This vulnerability is trivially exploitable in the local and non-default cases (attackers will have working exploits before that, public or not). Qualys researchers report that in the default case, a remote attack takes a long time to succeed (to the best of our knowledge).
The vulnerability, which is tracked as CVE-2019-10149, affects versions 4.87 through 4.91. The flaw was fixed in version 4.92, which was released in February. But it was never identified as a vulnerability. What’s more, many distributions of Linux have continued to ship with vulnerable Exim versions.
Millions of servers affected
Currently more than 4.7 million machines are running a vulnerable Exim version. It’s a good bet that a non-trivial percentage of these machines are susceptible to the attacks. Updates to version 4.92 are available here.
Let’s check how to patch the exim.
How to check Exim vulnerability? (CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu)
Checking Exim version, installed on a server (CentOS):
# rpm -qa |grep exim
Checking Exim version in Debian / Ubuntu:
# dpkg --list |grep exim
If it shows Exim version between versions 4.87 through 4.91, you show apply an update to fix.
[root@vps ~]# rpm -qa |grep exim exim-4.84.2-1.el7.x86_64
How to patch Exim vulnerability?
New Exim update (from the version 4.92 already patched) so we have just to update the server sofware:
In CentOS 6:
# yum --enablerepo=epel=testing update exim
In CentOS 7:
# yum update exim
In Debian or Ubuntu:
# apt-get update # apt-get install exim4
Customers with our dedicated servers and Cloud VPS servers
Contact our support department immediately at supp24.com, we will assist all our users to fix an Exim installation.