CriticalCVE-2025-48703

    CWP Control Web Panel OS Command Injection Vulnerability (CVE-2025-48703)

    Published In CISA KEV since Sources: pwn.watch, CVE.org

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    What is affected, what to do

    This vulnerability allows an attacker to perform unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) on systems running Control Web Panel versions prior to 0.9.8.1205. By exploiting shell metacharacters in the `t_total` parameter of a `changePerm` request in the file manager, an attacker can execute arbitrary code if they have knowledge of a valid non-root username. The vulnerability is actively exploited, as evidenced by its listing in the CISA KEV catalog. Organizations using Control Web Panel should urgently update to version 0.9.8.1205 to mitigate this risk.

    The vulnerability is being actively exploited; treat it as a priority. Update CentOS Web Panel to version 0.9.8.1205. Immediate actions, mitigation and detection rules are in the runbook below.

    Affected
    • CentOS Web Panel lt *..0.9.8.1205
    Fixed in
    • CentOS Web Panel 0.9.8.1205

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

    Metrics

    9.0

    Priority

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

    Source: NVD, CVSS v3

    9.0

    CVSS v3

    Severity Critical on the scale from 0 to 10.

    Source: pwn.watch, CVE.org

    99.66 %

    EPSS score

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

    Source: FIRST EPSS, percentile 99.95

    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
    235.80 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 exploitedSource: VulnCheck KEV (opens in a new tab) How we classify
    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
    9.0 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
    9.0
    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“.

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    99.66 %
    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
    99.95
    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 November 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-78

    Response and mitigation

    Why act now?

    Prioritisation rationale

    The combination of pre-authentication RCE over HTTP, trivial reachability on standard hosting ports and prevalence in shared-hosting environments makes this flaw a prime target for mass exploitation by scanner botnets and cryptomining crews; KEV listing and the very high exploitation likelihood confirm active abuse. Primary target profiles are web hosters, MSPs and digital agencies running CWP fleets — a single compromised panel host can expose hundreds of tenants. For NIS2-scope organisations with CWP at the perimeter: if the patch cannot be deployed within 24 h, disconnect the panel from the internet and treat the host as potentially compromised. The absence of a ransomware flag in KEV is not reassurance — initial-access brokers routinely resell footholds like this one.

    1. Runbook step 1

      Immediate response (0-24 h)

      • Upgrade CWP/Control Web Panel to version 0.9.8.1205 or later — this fixes the command injection in the t_total parameter of the filemanager changePerm endpoint. Roll out via yum update cwp or the CWP updater script and verify with cat /usr/local/cwpsrv/htdocs/resources/admin/include/cwp_ver.php.
      • Remove CWP admin interfaces from the public internet immediately (default TCP ports 2030, 2031, 2082, 2083, 2086, 2087): add iptables/nftables rules or perimeter ACLs that permit these ports only from the admin VPN or defined jump-host IPs.
      • Hunt for compromise on every CWP host: inspect the web root (/usr/local/cwpsrv/htdocs/), /tmp, /var/tmp, /dev/shm for webshells and recently dropped binaries; review running processes and crontab -l for root and all panel users.
      • Rotate credentials for every non-root CWP user and invalidate panel API tokens and SSH keys, because the flaw requires a valid non-root username (enumeration is trivial) and account takeovers were possible before patching.
      • Open a P1 incident ticket; if the host was internet-exposed, treat it as potentially compromised and take a forensic image before rebuilding.

    2. Runbook step 2

      Mitigation layers

      • Network segmentation: place CWP hosts in a dedicated management VLAN with strict egress filtering — outbound only to repo mirrors, DNS and NTP; block arbitrary outbound to 0.0.0.0/0 on 80/443/4444/8080 (typical reverse-shell and payload-download destinations).
      • Front CWP with a WAF or reverse proxy (nginx/HAProxy/Cloudflare) that blocks or at minimum alerts on requests to /*filemanager* carrying shell metacharacters (;, |, `, $(, &&, %0a, %26) in the t_total parameter.
      • Expose the admin panel only behind mTLS, VPN or IP allowlist; add HTTP Basic Auth at the reverse proxy as a pre-auth layer in front of the CWP login.
      • Endpoint hardening: set SELinux to enforcing; mount /tmp, /var/tmp, /dev/shm with noexec,nosuid so dropped ELF payloads cannot execute.
      • Enforce least privilege for the web-server user (cwpsrv, nobody, apache): no sudo entries, no write permissions outside panel directories; apply systemd capability drops (NoNewPrivileges=yes, ProtectSystem=strict).
      • Validate backup and recovery: take a fresh offline backup of tenant data before any patch rollout, because rebuilding is the only clean option for an already-compromised instance.

    3. Runbook step 3

      Detection rules

      • Web-server access logs (/usr/local/apache/logs/access_log, nginx logs): search for POST/GET to changePerm with URL-encoded shell metacharacters in t_total. KQL example: WebLogs | where UrlPath contains "filemanager" and (QueryString matches regex @"t_total=[^&]*(%3B|%7C|%60|%24%28|%26%26|%0a)").
      • Sysmon EID 1 / auditd execve: process ancestry where cwpsrv, httpd or apache spawns children such as sh, bash, curl, wget, python, perl, nc, chmod +x — classic webshell/dropper behaviour.
      • Sigma shape: parent_image: /usr/local/cwpsrv/bin/cwpsrv AND image|endswith: ('/sh','/bash','/curl','/wget','/python','/perl','/nc','/nc.openbsd') as a high-severity alert.
      • Network telemetry (Zeek/Suricata): new outbound connections from the CWP host to non-allowlisted IPs on 4444/TCP, 1337/TCP, or HTTP GETs with user agents curl/*, Wget/*, python-requests/* originating from the web-server context.
      • File-system monitoring (auditd -w /usr/local/cwpsrv/htdocs -p wa, -w /tmp -p wa): new .php, .sh or ELF files in the web root or temp directories, especially within 60 seconds of a suspicious changePerm request.

    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

    CWP (aka Control Web Panel or CentOS Web Panel) before 0.9.8.1205 allows unauthenticated remote code execution via shell metacharacters in the t_total parameter in a filemanager changePerm request. A valid non-root username must be known.

    Source: pwn.watch, 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
    centos-webpanelCentOS Web Panel
    • < 0.9.8.1205
    • 0.9.8.1205
    control-webpanelwebpanel
    • < 0.9.8.1205
    • 0.9.8.1205

    Vendors and products

    Weakness classes (CWE)

    • CWE-78Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an OS Command ('OS Command Injection')

      Base

      The product constructs all or part of an OS command using externally-influenced input from an upstream component, but it does not neutralize or incorrectly neutralizes special elements that could modify the intended OS command when it is sent to a downstream component.

      Entry at MITRE CWE-78

    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

    References & sources

    • fenrisk.comrce-centos-webpanelExploit, Third-party advisory
    • cisa.govknown-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog?field_cve=CVE-2025-48703government-resource, US government resource
    • control-webpanel.comCWP advisory: CWP Control Web PanelMitigation, Release notes, pwn-watch
    • pwn.watchpwn.watch: CWP Control Web Panel: Control Web Panel OS Command Injection Vulnerabilitypwn-watch
    • NVD (NIST)NVD: CVE-2025-48703pwn-watch
    • cisa.govCISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalogpwn-watch
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