July 11, 2024 By Pierluigi Paganini

Multiple threat actors exploit a recently disclosed security PHP flaw CVE-2024-4577 to deliver multiple malware families.
The Akamai Security Intelligence Response Team (SIRT) warns that multiple threat actors are exploiting the PHP vulnerability CVE-2024-4577 to deliver multiple malware families, including Gh0st RAT, RedTail cryptominers, and XMRig.
“Threat actors continued the speedy-time-from-disclosure-to-exploitation trend and were quick to leverage this new vulnerability — we observed exploit attempts targeting this PHP flaw on our honeypot network within 24 hours of its disclosure.” reported Akamai.
The flaw CVE-2024-4577 (CVSS score: 9.8) is a PHP-CGI OS Command Injection Vulnerability. The issue resides in the Best-Fit feature of encoding conversion within the Windows operating system. An attacker can exploit the flaw to bypass protections for a previous vulnerability, CVE-2012-1823, using specific character sequences. Consequently, arbitrary code can be executed on remote PHP servers through an argument injection attack, allowing attackers to take control of vulnerable servers.