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CVE-2022-22965: Spring4Shell

Code Injection: Is CVE-2022-22965 real, exploitable, or a false positive? Here's the community verdict.

Community verdict: No field verdicts yet. Be the first practitioner to weigh in.

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signals

public sources

Exploited in wild
Yes
CISA KEV · Apr 4, 2022
Public exploit
Metasploit +1
Metasploit/EDB/PoC
Base severity
9.8 Critical
CVSS
Exploitation prob.
100%
FIRST EPSS
Weakness
CWE-94 · Code Injection
CWE

Confirmed exploited in the wild. Patch this first, regardless of the base score.

cisa ssvc

CISA Vulnrichment · assessed

Exploitation
Active
in the wild
Automatable
Yes
at scale
Technical impact
Total
on success

CISA decision, by how critical the affected system is to you:

  • low impact → Attend
  • medium impact → Act
  • high impact → Act

Track: normal patch cycle · Track*: watch closely · Attend: patch sooner · Act: patch now. About SSVC ↗

public exploits

links to sources — we don’t host code
MetasploitGitHub PoC(5)unverified

A working exploit is publicly available from a maintained source. Treat this as higher urgency and verify your exposure.

affected packages

GHSA-36p3-wjmg-h94x · GitHub rates it critical
  • Mavenorg.springframework:spring-beans
    Vulnerable
    < 5.2.20.RELEASE; ≥ 5.3.0, < 5.3.18
    Fixed in
    5.2.20.RELEASE, 5.3.18
  • Mavenorg.springframework:spring-webmvc
    Vulnerable
    < 5.2.20.RELEASE; ≥ 5.3.0, < 5.3.18
    Fixed in
    5.2.20.RELEASE, 5.3.18
  • Mavenorg.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-web
    Vulnerable
    < 2.5.12; ≥ 2.6.0, < 2.6.6
    Fixed in
    2.5.12, 2.6.6
  • Mavenorg.springframework:spring-webflux
    Vulnerable
    < 5.2.20.RELEASE; ≥ 5.3.0, < 5.3.18
    Fixed in
    5.2.20.RELEASE, 5.3.18
  • Mavenorg.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-webflux
    Vulnerable
    < 2.5.12; ≥ 2.6.0, < 2.6.6
    Fixed in
    2.5.12, 2.6.6

Source: GitHub Advisory Database (CC-BY 4.0), via OSV.dev. Check your lockfile version against the ranges above.

baseline read

auto · not a community verdict

Real — exploited in the wild

CISA confirms active exploitation. Treat scanner hits as true positives unless your specific version or config is unaffected.

Based on CISA KEV

Confirm or dispute →
Affected:VMwareCiscoOracleSiemensVeritas

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

A Spring MVC or Spring WebFlux application running on JDK 9+ may be vulnerable to remote code execution (RCE) via data binding. The specific exploit requires the application to run on Tomcat as a WAR deployment. If the application is deployed as a Spring Boot executable jar, i.e. the default, it is not vulnerable to the exploit. However, the nature of the vulnerability is more general, and there may be other ways to exploit it.

References

NVD MITRE CVE.org CISA KEV VulnCheck KEV

Published · Added to CISA KEV (3 days after publication)

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timeline

  1. CISA SSVC assessment · exploitation: active
  2. Added to VulnCheck KEV · reported exploited in the wild
  3. Added to CISA KEV · confirmed exploited in the wild
  4. Published by NVD

Score and exploit changes tracked since .

Community ground truth

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In your experience, is this finding real and exploitable?

awaiting field verdicts
Real, but not a risk here
Not a real issue

Curated baseline: TruePositive's read from public sources is Real, needs specific conditions — a starting point, not a community verdict.

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Field notes & remediation

Verdicts are the quick signal. Notes are the evidence and fixes behind them.

  • 0
    Field note · TruePositive EditorialCurated

    Real, but it has specific conditions, and many setups are not exploitable by the known method. It is a remote code execution bug in the Spring Framework. It abuses Spring's data binding to write a malicious file (a web shell) onto the server.

    For the well-known exploit to work, several things must all be true. The app runs on JDK 9 or newer, it uses Spring MVC or WebFlux, it is deployed as a traditional WAR on Apache Tomcat, and it uses the affected data binding. A typical Spring Boot app packaged as an executable jar (with embedded Tomcat) is not exploitable by the public exploit. So a scanner flag does not always mean you are exploitable. Check how the app is deployed.

    Do not confuse this with CVE-2022-22963 (Spring Cloud Function SpEL). They are two different bugs that came out around the same time.

    Commonly flagged by: Trivy, Snyk, Dependabot.

  • 0
    Remediation · TruePositive EditorialCurated

    Upgrade Spring Framework to 5.3.18+ or 5.2.20+ (and Spring Boot 2.6.6+ or 2.5.12+). If you cannot upgrade right away, the documented workaround is to block the dangerous fields in a ControllerAdvice (disallow class, module, and classLoader binding). But upgrading is the clean fix. After patching, check web-accessible folders for unexpected .jsp or .class files (dropped web shells).

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Related CVEs

Same weakness: CWE-94 · Code Injection.