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Morris Worm sendmail Debug Mode Shell Escape

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Morris Worm sendmail Debug Mode Shell Escape

Disclosed
11/02/1988
Created
03/19/2019

Description

This module exploits sendmail's well-known historical debug mode to escape to a shell and execute commands in the SMTP RCPT TO command. This vulnerability was exploited by the Morris worm in 1988-11-02. Cliff Stoll reports on the worm in the epilogue of The Cuckoo's Egg. Currently, only cmd/unix/reverse and cmd/unix/generic are supported.

Author(s)

  • Robert Tappan Morris
  • Cliff Stoll
  • wvu <wvu@metasploit.com>

Platform

Unix

Architectures

cmd

Development

Module Options

To display the available options, load the module within the Metasploit console and run the commands 'show options' or 'show advanced':

msf > use exploit/unix/smtp/morris_sendmail_debug
msf exploit(morris_sendmail_debug) > show targets
    ...targets...
msf exploit(morris_sendmail_debug) > set TARGET < target-id >
msf exploit(morris_sendmail_debug) > show options
    ...show and set options...
msf exploit(morris_sendmail_debug) > exploit

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