The issue does not affect systems where Jabber is used in phone-only mode, without XMPP messaging services enabled. The file would be executed with the same privileges as those of the user who launched the Jabber client application. Attackers can do this manually on their own machine or it can be automated to create a worm that spreads automatically,” the company continues.Īn attacker looking to exploit the vulnerability needs to send XMPP messages to PCs running Jabber for Windows, and may require access to “the same XMPP domain or another method of access to be able to send messages to clients,” the tech company explains.įurthermore, Cisco notes that the attacker could cause the affected program to “run an arbitrary executable that already exists within the local file path of the application.” A malicious message can therefore easily be created by intercepting an XMPP message sent by the application and modifying it. “Cisco Jabber uses XHTML-IM by default for all messages. The XSS filter used to sanitize incoming HTML messages was found to be flawed and could be bypassed using the onanimationstart attribute, which specifies “a JavaScript function that will be called when an element’s CSS animation starts playing,” Watchcom says. Watchcom, the security firm that identified the flaw in the video conferencing and instant messaging application, explains that the code execution is the result of Cross Site Scripting (XSS) through XHTML-IM messages.

An attacker able to successfully exploit the vulnerability could execute arbitrary programs on the target system, likely gaining code execution capabilities, Cisco says.

The issue exists because the software fails to properly validate message contents.

Tracked as CVE-2020-3495 and featuring a CVSS score of 9.9, the flaw can be exploited remotely without authentication through sending a specially crafted Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) message to a vulnerable application. Cisco last week released patches to address a critical remote code execution vulnerability in Jabber for Windows.

Cisco jabber for windows phone only