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wget Password Exposure Vulnerability

A vulnerability has been discovered in the GNU Project's wget file transfer utility. A local authenticated user could exploit this vulnerability to obtain sensitive information.

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Summary

A vulnerability has been discovered in the GNU Project's wget file transfer utility. A local authenticated user could exploit this vulnerability to obtain sensitive information.


Threat details

wget stores file origin URLs as filesystem attributes under the variable user.xdg.origin.url. In some circumstances, the URL string can contain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, or secret tokens. A local user may be able to retrieve the URL strings using the getfattr command, at which point they would be able to extract this information

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Remediation steps

Type Step

The GNU Project have addressed this vulnerability in wget 1.20.1. Users and administrators are encouraged to update their affected systems immediately


Last edited: 14 February 2020 2:43 pm