CVE-2022-41040 is a vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange Server
Published on October 3, 2022

Microsoft Exchange Server Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability

Known Exploited Vulnerability

This Microsoft Exchange Server Server-Side Request Forgery Vulnerability is part of CISA's list of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities. Microsoft Exchange Server allows for server-side request forgery. Dubbed "ProxyNotShell," this vulnerability is chainable with CVE-2022-41082 which allows for remote code execution.

The following remediation steps are recommended / required by October 21, 2022: Apply updates per vendor instructions.

Vulnerability Analysis

CVE-2022-41040 is exploitable with network access, and requires small amount of user privileges. This vulnerability is considered to have a low attack complexity. It has an exploitability score of 2.8 out of four. The potential impact of an exploit of this vulnerability is considered to be very high.

What is a XSPA Vulnerability?

The web server receives a URL or similar request from an upstream component and retrieves the contents of this URL, but it does not sufficiently ensure that the request is being sent to the expected destination. By providing URLs to unexpected hosts or ports, attackers can make it appear that the server is sending the request, possibly bypassing access controls such as firewalls that prevent the attackers from accessing the URLs directly. The server can be used as a proxy to conduct port scanning of hosts in internal networks, use other URLs such as that can access documents on the system (using file://), or use other protocols such as gopher:// or tftp://, which may provide greater control over the contents of requests.

CVE-2022-41040 has been classified to as a XSPA vulnerability or weakness.

Products Associated with CVE-2022-41040

You can be notified by stack.watch whenever vulnerabilities like CVE-2022-41040 are published in these products:

Microsoft Exchange Server

What versions of Exchange Server are vulnerable to CVE-2022-41040?