InjectionWeakness · CWE-74

CVE-2024-53860

HIGH · 8.6 CVSS v3.1 Published 2024-11-27
Patch available
A vendor patch is available. No clean upgrade release — apply the published patch.
See remediation →
95/100
Remediation priority · Urgent
Remotely reachable No privileges Zero-click Patch available

Official description Straight from the sourceThe vendor's or NVD's own wording, published unedited. Authoritative, but often terse — it says what broke, rarely what to do.

NVD · unedited
sp-php-email-handler is a PHP package for handling contact form submissions. Messages sent using this script are vulnerable to abuse, as the script allows anybody to specify arbitrary email recipients and include user-provided content in confirmation emails. This could enable malicious actors to use your server to send spam, phishing emails, or other malicious content, potentially damaging your domain's reputation and leading to blacklisting by email providers. Patched in version 1.0.0 by removing user-provided content from confirmation emails. All pre-release versions (alpha and beta) are vulnerable to this issue and should not be used. There are no workarounds for this issue. Users must upgrade to version 1.0.0 to mitigate the vulnerability.

Technical summary Written by usOur analysis, written from the advisory, the CVSS vector and the affected-version data. It adds context the advisory leaves out, and never invents facts that are not in the source.

dbcve analysis
How this class of weakness works · CWE-74

Untrusted input crosses into a downstream interpreter — SQL, a shell, an HTML page, an LDAP query — without being kept separate from the commands around it, so the attacker's data is read as instructions. This is the parent class behind SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and command injection alike. The durable fix is the same everywhere: keep data and code apart at every boundary, using parameterisation or context-aware encoding rather than building interpreted strings by concatenation.

General guidance for the injection class — the official description and references above are authoritative for this specific CVE. Want a bespoke review and a reviewed fix? Ask our team →

CVSS breakdown How the score is builtThe industry scoring standard. It rates how the flaw is reached, what it takes to exploit, and what an attacker gains — the score is derived from those, not the other way round.

From the vector
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Changed
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
High
Availability
None

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:H/A:N

Remediation Closing itWhat it takes to close this. Where a vendor fix exists we point at it; where none exists we say so plainly, and can build one. Effort estimates are scoped from the advisory, not from your codebase.

dbcve · scoped
Patch available Apply the vendor patch
Vendor patch github.com →
Recommended fix High confidence

version 1.0.0

  1. Identify the current version of sp-php-email-handler in use by checking your composer.json or package files
  2. Update the package to version 1.0.0 using your PHP package manager (e.g., composer require spencer14420/sp-email-handler:1.0.0 or composer update spencer14420/sp-email-handler)
  3. Verify the updated version is installed correctly by checking composer.lock
  4. Test that contact form functionality continues to work as expected with the patched version
  5. Ensure your application no longer allows arbitrary email recipients or user-provided content in confirmation emails
Caveat The patch removes user-provided content from confirmation emails; if any legitimate functionality depended on this (though it was a security vulnerability), it will need to be refactored

Generated from the published advisory — verify against the referenced sources before acting.

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References Go to the primary sourcePrimary sources — vendor advisories, patches and trackers. Where our summary and a reference disagree, the reference wins.

Primary sources

Practitioner notes

Contributed

Peer-ranked notes from engineers who’ve handled CVE-2024-53860 in production — separate from our analysis above.

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What this is

A place for practitioners to share what actually worked: a mitigation you’ve tested, a configuration change, a version- or environment-specific caveat, or a link to a verified patch. The most useful notes rise to the top as peers upvote them, so the signal stays high.

What belongs here
  • Verified mitigations, workarounds, and config changes
  • Version or environment caveats, and links to real fixes
  • No weaponised exploit code, or anything meant to cause harm
  • No spam, self-promotion, credentials, or personal data