by Jacqueline D.
Now this is an interesting one! A few days ago researchers discovered this vulnerability in the PaperCut print management software for Windows. NIST has designated it CVE-2023-39143, and it is categorized as a path traversal flaw. They’ve rated it as a critical vulnerability, which struck me as odd because a lot of these types of flaws end up not being too severe, but digging in a bit deeper made it clear why this one is such a problem.
The main issue is that this flaw in particular allows attackers to execute arbitrary code with no authentication at all. Unlike some path traversal issues where exploiting the vulnerability requires access to a user or even administrator account, there are no such mitigating factors to be found here. What’s worse is that an external device integration setting (that’s enabled by default on some versions of the software) can allow even more damage to be done.
The good news? PaperCut’s 22.1.3 version of the software includes a patch. Also, Horizon3 (who discovered the problem) offers a tool to find out if your version of the software is at risk. Since this is pretty similar to a vulnerability that allowed for some highly-damaging ransomware attacks in the past year, this is something you’re going to want to investigate right away.
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