A critical vulnerability has been discovered in
PHPMailer, which is one of the most popular open source PHP libraries to send emails used by more than 9 Million users worldwide.
Millions of PHP websites and popular open source web applications, including WordPress, Drupal, 1CRM, SugarCRM, Yii, and Joomla comes with PHPMailer library for sending emails using a variety of methods, including SMTP to their users.
Discovered by Polish security researcher Dawid Golunski of
Legal Hackers, the critical vulnerability (
CVE-2016-10033) allows an attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code in the context of the web server and compromise the target web application.
"To exploit the vulnerability an attacker could target common website components such as contact/feedback forms, registration forms, password email resets and others that send out emails with the help of a vulnerable version of the PHPMailer class," Golunski writes in the
advisory published today.
Golunski responsibly reported the vulnerability to the developers, who have patched the vulnerability in their new release,
PHPMailer 5.2.18.
