CriticalCVE-2016-3088

    Apache ActiveMQ Improper Input Validation Vulnerability (CVE-2016-3088)

    Published In CISA KEV since Sources: CVE.org, OSV

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    What is affected, what to do

    The Fileserver web application in Apache ActiveMQ 5.x before 5.14.0 allows remote attackers to upload and execute arbitrary files via an HTTP PUT followed by an HTTP MOVE request.

    The vulnerability is being actively exploited; treat it as a priority. Update Apache ActiveMQ to version 5.14.0. Immediate actions, mitigation and detection rules are in the runbook below.

    Affected
    • Apache ActiveMQ lt 5.0.0..5.14.0
    Fixed in
    • Apache ActiveMQ 5.14.0

    Not sure whether and how you are affected? Ask a question about this vulnerability

    Metrics

    9.8

    Priority

    XIEM Effective CVSS: highest available CVSS rating from NVD and vendor data.

    Source: NVD, CVSS v3

    9.8

    CVSS v3

    Severity Critical on the scale from 0 to 10.

    Source: CVE.org, OSV

    98.4 %

    EPSS score

    High — model estimates ≥ 50% chance of real-world exploitation within 30 days.

    Source: FIRST EPSS, percentile 99.92

    Show all metrics
    Severity
    Critical
    Priority (0–325)

    The priority score is a consolidated metric that condenses several individual signals into a single, action-guiding ranking: technical severity (CVSS), exploitation likelihood (EPSS), known-exploited status (KEV) and the context of the affected asset. The aim is to answer the only truly important question in vulnerability management: what first?

    Read in glossary
    228.87 Methodology
    Exploit maturity

    An exploit is code or a technique that specifically uses a concrete vulnerability to force unintended behaviour — such as executing code or escalating privileges. It is the tool that turns a theoretical flaw into a practical attack.

    Read in glossary
    actively exploited
    XIEM Effective CVSS

    XIEM® is the tiered managed-security operating model from NEOSEC and a registered trademark of NEOSEC GmbH. It extends classic SIEM — the central collection, normalisation and correlation of security-relevant events — with endpoint forensics, network visibility and deception technology, and consolidates them into three building tiers: Sentry, Orchestrate and Command.

    Read in glossary
    9.8 Methodology
    CVSS v3

    CVSS is the globally established, open standard for assessing the technical severity of a vulnerability on a scale from 0 to 10. It describes how easily a flaw can be exploited and what damage it can cause — but not how likely its actual exploitation is. CVSS and the complementary EPSS deliberately answer different questions.

    Read in glossary
    9.8
    EPSS score

    The EPSS score is the absolute model output for an individual vulnerability: the estimated probability of real-world exploitation within the next 30 days, expressed as a value between 0 and 1 (i.e. 0 % to 100 %). A score of 0.42 means „the model estimates a 42 % chance of real-world exploitation within 30 days“.

    Read in glossary
    98.4 %
    High — model estimates ≥ 50% chance of real-world exploitation within 30 days.
    EPSS percentile

    The EPSS percentile is the relative position of a vulnerability within all EPSS-scored CVEs, expressed as a value between 0 and 1. A percentile of 0.90 means „this CVE has a higher EPSS score than 90 % of all other scored CVEs“. Unlike the EPSS score, it is not a probability — but a positioning within a ranking.

    Read in glossary
    99.92
    Critical — this CVE ranks in the top fifth of all CVEs scored today (rank ≥ 80%).
    KEV status

    The KEV catalogue is a list maintained by the US authority CISA of vulnerabilities for which active exploitation in the wild has been confirmed. It answers not the question „how severe?“ but „is it already being attacked?“ — thereby sharply prioritising patching.

    Read in glossary
    Actively exploited
    Published
    In CISA KEV since

    The KEV catalogue is a list maintained by the US authority CISA of vulnerabilities for which active exploitation in the wild has been confirmed. It answers not the question „how severe?“ but „is it already being attacked?“ — thereby sharply prioritising patching.

    Read in glossary
    CISA assessment (SSVC)
    Exploitation: active · automatable · Technical impact: total
    Source: CISA Vulnrichment, as of 7 February 2025
    CWE

    CWE is a catalogue of typical weakness types in software and hardware — such as flawed input validation, unsafe memory handling or poor authentication. Where a CVE names a concrete vulnerability in a concrete product, a CWE describes the underlying class of defect.

    Read in glossary
    CWE-434

    Response and mitigation

    Why act now?

    Prioritisation rationale

    This CVE sits on KEV for good reason: unauthenticated remote code execution via a default web component, network-reachable, no user interaction, and public exploit code (Metasploit module) available for years — exploitation likelihood ranks among the highest observed. Typical victims are externally reachable MQ brokers in integration-heavy environments (finance, logistics, industrial IoT gateways) where middleware patching tends to lag application patching. For NIS2-scoped organisations: any internet- or B2B-reachable ActiveMQ instance below 5.14.0 is a P1 incident even without a specific alert, because the historical window between exposure and compromise is extremely short. The absence of a KEV ransomware flag does not lower urgency — this CVE is primarily abused for cryptomining and initial access brokering rather than direct ransomware deployment.

    1. Runbook step 1

      Immediate response (0-24 h)

      • Upgrade Apache ActiveMQ to 5.14.0 or newer — this is the vendor-fixed baseline. If immediate patching is impossible on legacy brokers, disable the Fileserver component as a first step.
      • Remove the Fileserver web application from conf/jetty.xml (comment out the /fileserver context) and restart the broker. The component has been deprecated since 5.12.0 and removed in 5.14.0 — no production use case justifies keeping it.
      • Block the admin console (default 8161/tcp) and OpenWire (61616/tcp) at the perimeter firewall; permit access only from defined management and application VLANs. End any public internet exposure of the ActiveMQ web interface immediately.
      • Rotate default credentials (admin:admin) and audit conf/jetty-realm.properties for weak passwords. Restrict access to /admin and /api to authenticated roles only.
      • Perform forensic triage on affected hosts: look for dropped webshells, JSP files and modified Jetty webapps under webapps/, webapps-demo/ and data/. This CVE has been exploited in the wild since 2016, so unpatched legacy systems should be assumed compromised until proven otherwise.

    2. Runbook step 2

      Mitigation layers

      • Network segmentation: place ActiveMQ brokers in a dedicated backend VLAN with no direct ingress from office or DMZ networks. Restrict broker egress to known MQ client ranges to break reverse-shell and tool-download paths.
      • WAF/reverse proxy in front of Jetty: block HTTP PUT and MOVE methods entirely for any path under /fileserver/ and /admin/. Allowlist only GET, POST, HEAD, OPTIONS on the remaining admin console.
      • Filesystem hardening: run the Jetty process as an unprivileged service account with no write permissions on webapps/ at runtime. Enforce a SELinux/AppArmor profile denying exec on writable paths of the activemq process.
      • IPS signatures: enable ET Open Snort/Suricata rules covering CVE-2016-3088 (HTTP PUT to /fileserver/ with .jsp payload and the follow-up MOVE). Verify vendor SIDs in your ruleset.
      • File integrity monitoring (Wazuh, Tripwire, osquery) on the Jetty webapp directories: any runtime file creation under webapps/admin/ or webapps/fileserver/ must alert — these directories are static in a healthy deployment.

    3. Runbook step 3

      Detection rules

      • Web access log (Jetty request.log): hunt for HTTP PUT or MOVE requests against /fileserver/. Sigma shape: selection: cs-method in ['PUT','MOVE'] AND cs-uri-stem startswith '/fileserver/'. Every match is an exploitation attempt.
      • Sysmon EID 1 / auditd execve: ActiveMQ java process spawning child processes such as cmd.exe, powershell.exe, /bin/sh, bash, wget, curl, nc. KQL example: DeviceProcessEvents | where InitiatingProcessFileName == "java.exe" and FileName in ("cmd.exe","powershell.exe").
      • Sysmon EID 11 / auditd path watches: file writes with extensions .jsp, .war, .class inside the ActiveMQ installation tree (webapps/, webapps-demo/).
      • Netflow/Zeek: outbound connections from the broker to unusual ports (anything other than 61616, 5672, 61613) and DNS lookups against Pastebin, Ngrok or dynamic-DNS domains — a common second-stage download pattern.
      • Jetty error log: 401/403 on /admin/ paths followed by a successful 200 on /fileserver/ uploads indicates an authentication bypass via the Fileserver path.

    Detection rules

    No NEOSEC detection rule is available for this vulnerability yet.

    Classification under NIS2 and CRA

    Rule-based classification from exploitation status and severity. It does not replace a case-by-case assessment.

    NIS2

    NIS2 is EU Directive (EU) 2022/2555 to raise the level of cybersecurity across the Union. It substantially broadens obligations compared with the first NIS directive: more sectors, mandatory risk management, staged reporting duties and personal accountability of senior management.

    Read in glossary
    Actively exploited: treat the vulnerability as a priority in vulnerability handling under Art. 21(2)(e) NIS2. If it is exploited in your environment, check the reporting obligation under Art. 23 (early warning within 24 hours).
    CRA

    The CRA is EU Regulation (EU) 2024/2847 setting horizontal cybersecurity requirements for „products with digital elements“ — from industrial controllers and software to connected consumer devices. For the first time manufacturers must ensure security across the entire product lifecycle, handle vulnerabilities and provide security updates.

    Read in glossary
    Since 11.09.2026, manufacturers of affected products with digital elements must report actively exploited vulnerabilities under Art. 14 CRA, with an early warning within 24 hours via ENISA's single reporting platform.
    ISO/IEC 27001

    ISO/IEC 27001 is the internationally leading standard for an information security management system (ISMS). It describes a risk-based, process-oriented framework to systematically plan, implement, review and improve information security.

    Read in glossary
    Control A.8.8, management of technical vulnerabilities: assess relevance to your systems, plan remediation and keep evidence.

    Description

    The Fileserver web application in Apache ActiveMQ 5.x before 5.14.0 allows remote attackers to upload and execute arbitrary files via an HTTP PUT followed by an HTTP MOVE request.

    Source: NVD (NIST), OSV (Open Source Vulnerabilities), cvelistv5, CISA KEV Catalog, CVE.org (MITRE)

    Affected products

    The following versions are affected. Older releases of the same product line are also vulnerable unless stated otherwise.

    Affected products
    Affected versionsFixed in
    apacheactivemq
    • 5.0.0 – < 5.14.0
    • 5.14.0
    mavenorg.apache.activemq:activemq-client
    • 5.12.2
    • 5.11.4
    • 5.8.0
    • 5.13.4
    • 5.13.5
    • 5.11.2
    • 5.11.0
    • 5.13.2
    • 5.10.0
    • 5.11.3
    • 5.12.1
    • 5.9.1
    • 5.9.0
    • 5.11.1
    • 5.13.1
    • 5.10.1
    • 5.12.3
    • 5.13.3
    • 5.13.0
    • 5.12.0
    • 5.10.2
    • 5.0.0
    • —
    • —
    • —
    • —
    • —
    • —
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    Vendors and products

    Weakness classes (CWE)

    • CWE-434Unrestricted Upload of File with Dangerous Type

      Base

      The product allows the upload or transfer of dangerous file types that are automatically processed within its environment.

      Entry at MITRE CWE-434

    Public exploit references

    Publicly reported proof-of-concepts, exploit modules and detection templates for this vulnerability. NEOSEC links to the original sources only and does not provide any exploit code.

    Public exploit references
    CISA KEV CatalogCISA Known Exploited Vulnerability (opens in a new tab)cisa.govactively exploited
    Exploit-DBEDB-ID 42283 (opens in a new tab)exploit-db.comPoC (publicly reported)reported, not verified—
    PoC-in-GitHub (nomi-sec)vulhub-activemq-cve-2016-3088 (opens in a new tab)github.comPoC (publicly reported)reported, not verified

    References & sources

    • NVD (NIST)vuln/detail/CVE-2016-3088advisory
    • github.comapache/activemq/commit/3dd86d04e8b90ba309819317d19e7260d414d9e7web
    • issues.apache.orgjira/browse/AMQ-6276web
    • lists.apache.org[activemq-commits] 20190327 svn commit: r1042639 - in /websites/production/activemq/content/activemq-website: ./ projects/artemis/download/ projects/classic/download/ projects/cms/download/ security-advisories.data/web, Mailing list, x_refsource_MLIST, Mailing list, Patch
    • lists.apache.orgthread.html/a859563f05fbe7c31916b3178c2697165bd9bbf5a65d1cf62ae…web
    • lists.apache.org[activemq-users] 20190703 Re: ActiveMQ cve vulnerabilities seen in latest versionweb, Mailing list, x_refsource_MLIST, Issue tracking, Mailing list
    • lists.apache.orgthread.html/f956ea38e4da2e2c1e7131e6f91e41754852f5a4861d1a14ca5…web
    • lists.apache.org[announce] 20200131 Apache Software Foundation Security Report: 2019web, Mailing list, x_refsource_MLIST, Mailing list, Vendor advisory
    • lists.apache.orgthread.html/r6d03e45b81eab03580cf7f8bb51cb3e9a1b10a2cc0c6a2d3cc…web
    • stackoverflow.comquestions/67140241/configuring-activemq-webconsole-to-redirect-…web
    • cisa.govknown-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog?field_cve=CVE-2016-3088web, government-resource, US government resource
    • exploit-db.comexploits/42283web
    • activemq.apache.orgsecurity-advisories.data/CVE-2016-3088-announcement.txtweb, x_refsource_CONFIRM, Vendor advisory
    • rhn.redhat.comRHSA-2016:2036web, Vendor advisory, x_refsource_REDHAT, Third-party advisory
    • securitytracker.com1035951web, Vulnerability database, x_refsource_SECTRACK, Broken link, Third-party advisory, Vulnerability database
    • zerodayinitiative.comadvisories/ZDI-16-356web, x_refsource_MISC, Third-party advisory, Vulnerability database
    • zerodayinitiative.comadvisories/ZDI-16-357web, x_refsource_MISC, Third-party advisory, Vulnerability database
    • exploit-db.com42283Exploit, x_refsource_EXPLOIT-DB, Exploit, Third-party advisory, Vulnerability database
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