OpenLiteSpeed Web Server, a globally popular open-source web server, was carrying a couple of high-severity vulnerabilities, experts have warned.
Threat actors that managed to exploit these flaws would have been given full privilege remote code execution capabilities, noted researchers from Unit 42, Palo Alto Networks’ cybersecurity research arm.
The team found OpenLiteSpeed Web Server carried three high-severity vulnerabilities, namely CVE-2022-0073 (an 8.8 severity score, high-severity remote code execution flaw), CVE-2022-0074 (an 8.8 high-severity privilege escalation flaw), and CVE-2022-0072 (a 5.8, medium-severity directory traversal flaw). The vulnerabilities also affected the enterprise version, LiteSpeed Web Server.
Patch ready
Unit 42 has notified LiteSpeed Technologies of its findings which has, subsequently, patched the flaws, and released new versions of the server, urging users to update their software immediately.
Organizations using OpenLiteSpeed versions 1.5.11 – 1.7.16, as well as LiteSPeed versions 5.4.6 – 6.0.11 are urged to bring their endpoints (opens in new tab) up to 1.7.16.1 and 6.0.12 as soon as possible.
According to Unit 42, the LiteSpeed Web Server is the sixth most popular web ofering around, serving roughly 2% of all Web Server applications, with almost 1.9 million unique servers around the world.
“We tried to imitate the actions of an adversary and engaged in research with the intention of finding vulnerabilities and disclosing them to the vendor,” the researchers explained in a blog post (opens in new tab).
“This research has resulted in finding three vulnerabilities that affect both the enterprise and open source solutions. These could be chained and exploited by an adversary who has the credentials for the admin dashboard, in order to gain privileged code execution on vulnerable components.”
Web servers have come a long way in terms of security and protections, Unit 42 concludes, adding that despite the optimistic outlook, vulnerabilities are still being found due to the rapid pace of technological evolution.
