CriticalCVE-2017-17562

    Embedthis GoAhead Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2017-17562)

    Published In CISA KEV since Sources: CVE.org

    What is affected, what to do

    Embedthis GoAhead before 3.6.5 allows remote code execution if CGI is enabled and a CGI program is dynamically linked. This is a result of initializing the environment of forked CGI scripts using untrusted HTTP request parameters in the cgiHandler function in cgi.c.

    The vulnerability is being actively exploited; treat it as a priority. Update EmbedThis GoAhead to version 3.6.5. Immediate actions, mitigation and detection rules are in the runbook below.

    Affected
    • EmbedThis GoAhead lt *..3.6.5
    • Oracle Integrated Lights Out Manager eq 3.0..3.0
    • Oracle Integrated Lights Out Manager eq 4.0..4.0
    Fixed in
    • EmbedThis GoAhead 3.6.5

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

    Metrics

    8.1

    Priority

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

    Source: NVD, CVSS v3

    8.1

    CVSS v3

    Severity High on the scale from 0 to 10.

    Source: CVE.org

    97.1 %

    EPSS score

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

    Source: FIRST EPSS, percentile 99.89

    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
    220.32 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
    8.1 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
    8.1
    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
    97.1 %
    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
    99.89
    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 · not automatable · Technical impact: total
    Source: CISA Vulnrichment, as of 4 February 2025

    Response and mitigation

    Why act now?

    Prioritisation rationale

    This CVE sits on KEV because GoAhead ships in millions of routers, IP cameras, printers and management controllers (notably Oracle ILOM), and the exploit matured into a public, one-shot unauthenticated RCE — exploitation likelihood ranks among the highest of any KEV entry. Attackers mass-scan the internet for GoAhead banners and POST ELF shared objects to drop IoT botnet payloads (Mirai variants) and crypto miners. For NIS2-regulated operators, treat every externally reachable GoAhead interface and every ILOM management endpoint as P1, internal appliances using CGI as P2, and internal appliances without CGI as P3. CISA has not flagged ransomware use, but the RCE is a credible initial-access vector into flat OT networks.

    1. Runbook step 1

      Immediate response (0-24 h)

      • Upgrade Embedthis GoAhead to 3.6.5 or later — this release fixes the unsafe CGI environment initialisation in cgiHandler (cgi.c). For embedded devices (routers, IP cameras, industrial gear), check vendor firmware since GoAhead is widely OEM-bundled.
      • Oracle Integrated Lights Out Manager (ILOM) 3.0 and 4.0: immediately move the management interface off the production network into a dedicated OOB management VLAN; access only via a hardened jump host with MFA.
      • If no patch can be applied right away: disable CGI (build flag ME_GOAHEAD_CGI=0, remove cgi from route.txt/config) or replace dynamically linked CGI binaries with statically linked equivalents — this neutralises the LD_PRELOAD vector.
      • Perimeter: restrict inbound HTTP/HTTPS to GoAhead instances (typically ports 80/443/8080) to trusted source IPs; block POST requests to /cgi-bin/* and anything referencing /proc/self/fd/0 at the reverse proxy/WAF.
      • Sweep the asset inventory across network, OT and facility devices: identify HTTP banners Server: GoAhead-Webs or GoAhead/x.y via internal scanning (Nmap http-server-header) and tag the hits as NIS2/KRITIS-relevant components.

    2. Runbook step 2

      Mitigation layers

      • Network segmentation: isolate GoAhead-based appliances and ILOM interfaces in dedicated management zones; no direct internet exposure, access only via VPN with client certificates.
      • WAF/IPS: signature targeting POST requests whose parameter names include LD_PRELOAD, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, LD_AUDIT, HTTP_PROXY, or whose body/query references /proc/self/fd/0; enable Suricata/Snort rule equivalent to ET SID 2024918 (Embedthis GoAhead CGI RCE).
      • Request hardening: enforce Content-Length limits (<4 KB) on CGI endpoints at the reverse proxy and drop bodies containing ELF magic bytes (7F 45 4C 46).
      • Endpoint/firmware hardening: replace dynamically linked CGI programs with static builds; use AllowDynamicCgi off or the equivalent build option; strip the /proc mount from any CGI chroot.
      • IAM/least privilege: run GoAhead as an unprivileged user with noexec on upload and temp directories; apply an SELinux/AppArmor profile that blocks execve() on freshly written shared objects.
      • Egress filtering: allow-list outbound destinations from appliance networks — this prevents reverse shells and second-stage downloads once code execution succeeds.

    3. Runbook step 3

      Detection rules

      • Web access logs: POST requests to /cgi-bin/* whose query parameters contain LD_PRELOAD, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, LD_AUDIT or references to /proc/self/fd/0. KQL shape: WebLogs | where UrlPath startswith "/cgi-bin/" and (QueryString has_any ("LD_PRELOAD","LD_AUDIT","/proc/self/fd/0") or RequestBody has "ELF").
      • Network telemetry (Zeek http.log): method=="POST" combined with request_body_len > 1000, uri containing cgi-bin, and a non-browser user_agent — a plausible payload delivery pattern.
      • Linux auditd on the appliance (where available): execve events whose parent is the GoAhead webserver and whose child is an unexpected binary such as /bin/sh, something in /tmp/*, or a process launched with LD_PRELOAD set.
      • Suricata/Snort: rule matching ELF magic in the HTTP body (content:"|7F 45 4C 46|"; http_client_body;) combined with a /cgi-bin/ URI; alert as P1.
      • EDR process tree: webserver process (goahead, webs) as parent of an interactive shell or network client (curl, wget, nc, busybox). Sigma shape: parent_image|endswith: '/goahead' with image|endswith: ('/sh','/busybox','/nc').

    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

    Embedthis GoAhead before 3.6.5 allows remote code execution if CGI is enabled and a CGI program is dynamically linked. This is a result of initializing the environment of forked CGI scripts using untrusted HTTP request parameters in the cgiHandler function in cgi.c. When combined with the glibc dynamic linker, this behaviour can be abused for remote code execution using special parameter names such as LD_PRELOAD. An attacker can POST their shared object payload in the body of the request, and reference it using /proc/self/fd/0.

    Source: NVD (NIST), 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
    embedthisgoahead
    • < 3.6.5
    • 3.6.5
    oracleintegrated_lights_out_manager
    • 3.0
    • 4.0
    • —
    • —

    Vendors and products

    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 43360 (opens in a new tab)exploit-db.comPoC (publicly reported)reported, not verified—
    Exploit-DBEDB-ID 43877 (opens in a new tab)exploit-db.comPoC (publicly reported)reported, not verified—

    References & sources

    • github.comelttam/advisories/tree/master/CVE-2017-17562x_refsource_MISC, Broken link, Third-party advisory
    • securitytracker.com1040702Vulnerability database, x_refsource_SECTRACK, Broken link, Third-party advisory, Vulnerability database
    • elttam.com.aublog/goaheadx_refsource_MISC, Broken link, Exploit, Patch, Third-party advisory
    • exploit-db.com43360Exploit, x_refsource_EXPLOIT-DB, Exploit, Third-party advisory, Vulnerability database
    • oracle.comtechnetwork/security-advisory/cpuapr2018-3678067.htmlx_refsource_CONFIRM, Patch, Third-party advisory
    • github.comembedthis/goahead/commit/6f786c123196eb622625a920d54048629a7caa…x_refsource_MISC, Broken link, Patch, Third-party advisory
    • github.comembedthis/goahead/issues/249x_refsource_MISC, Broken link, Issue tracking, Third-party advisory
    • exploit-db.com43877Exploit, x_refsource_EXPLOIT-DB, Exploit, Third-party advisory, Vulnerability database
    • cisa.govknown-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog?field_cve=CVE-2017-17562government-resource, US government resource
    Embed badge

    Show the severity and KEV status of this vulnerability on your site – with a link back here. The image is updated hourly.

    Badge preview for CVE-2017-17562
    <a href="https://intel.neosec.eu/en/cve/CVE-2017-17562"><img src="https://intel.neosec.eu/badge/cve/CVE-2017-17562.svg?lang=en" alt="CVE-2017-17562 – NEOSEC Intel" height="20"></a>