This article is a part of our Vulnerability Database (back to index)
Cross-Site Request Forgery occurrences in Dada Mail
Dada Mail is a web-based e-mail list management system. In affected versions a bad actor could give someone a carefully crafted web page via email, SMS, etc, that - when visited, allows them control of the list control panel as if the bad actor was logged in themselves. This includes changing any mailing list password, as well as the Dada Mail Root Password - which could effectively shut out actual list owners of the mailing list and allow the bad actor complete and unfettered control of your mailing list. This vulnerability also affects profile logins. For this vulnerability to work, the target of the bad actor would need to be logged into the list control panel themselves. This CSRF vulnerability in Dada Mail affects all versions of Dada Mail v11.15.1 and below. Although we know of no known CSRF exploits that have happened in the wild, this vulnerability has been confirmed by our testing, and by a third party. Users are advised to update to version 11.16.0. (2021-09-20, CVE-2021-41083)
Why Cross-Site Request Forgery can be dangerous
The absence of Anti-CSRF tokens may lead to a Cross-Site Request Forgery attack that can result in executing a specific application action as another logged in user, e.g. steal their account by changing their email and password or silently adding a new admin user account when executed from the administrator account.
The attacker may copy one of your web application forms, e.g. email/password change form.
The webpage will contain a form with the exact set of fields as the original application but with input values already provided and the submit button replaced with a Javascript code causing auto-submission. When the page is accessed the form will be immediately submitted and page contents replaced with a valid content or a redirect to your original application.
One of your application users who is already logged in can be then tricked to navigate to such malicious page e.g. by clicking a link in a phishing email, and the pre-populated form content will be submitted to your application like it would be submitted by your user.