What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-34469: Cowrie < 2.9.0 Unrestricted wget/curl Emulation Enables SSRF-Based DDoS Amplification

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2025-12-31 · updated 2026-10-08
• Weakness: CWE-918

Description

Cowrie versions prior to 2.9.0 contain a server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerability in the emulated shell implementation of wget and curl. In the default emulated shell configuration, these command emulations perform real outbound HTTP requests to attacker-supplied destinations. Because no outbound request rate limiting was enforced, unauthenticated remote attackers could repeatedly invoke these commands to generate unbounded HTTP traffic toward arbitrary third-party targets, allowing the Cowrie honeypot to be abused as a denial-of-service amplification node and masking the attacker’s true source address behind the honeypot’s IP.

Affected products

• Cowrie: before 2.9.0 — fixed in 2.9.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Cowrie 2.9.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-83jg-m2pm-4jxj
• https://github.com/cowrie/cowrie/issues/2622
• https://github.com/cowrie/cowrie/pull/2800
• https://github.com/cowrie/cowrie/releases/tag/v2.9.0
• https://www.vulncheck.com/advisories/cowrie-unrestricted-wget-curl-emulation-enables-ssrf-based-ddos-amplification
• https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-83jg-m2pm-4jxj

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