What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-28398

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.2 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2022-09-05 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-78

Description

A privileged attacker in GeoNetwork before 3.12.0 and 4.x before 4.0.4 can use the directory harvester before-script to execute arbitrary OS commands remotely on the hosting infrastructure. A User Administrator or Administrator account is required to perform this. This occurs in the runBeforeScript method in harvesters/src/main/java/org/fao/geonet/kernel/harvest/harvester/localfilesystem/LocalFilesystemHarvester.java. The earliest affected version is 3.4.0.

Affected products

• geonetwork core-geonetwork: from 3.4.0 before 3.12.0; from 4.0.0 before 4.0.4; 4.0.0-alpha1, 4.0.0-alpha2 — fixed in 3.12.0, 4.0.4

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: geonetwork core-geonetwork 3.12.0, 4.0.4. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://geonetwork-opensource.org/
• https://geonetwork-opensource.org/manuals/trunk/en/overview/change-log/version-3.6.0.html
• https://github.com/geonetwork/core-geonetwork
• https://github.com/geonetwork/core-geonetwork/security/advisories/GHSA-cf8p-c88c-h9jf
• https://geonetwork-opensource.org/
• https://geonetwork-opensource.org/manuals/trunk/en/overview/change-log/version-3.6.0.html
• https://github.com/geonetwork/core-geonetwork
• https://github.com/geonetwork/core-geonetwork/security/advisories/GHSA-cf8p-c88c-h9jf

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