CVE-2015-8476 SMTP Injection in PHPMailer

What is CVE-2015-8476?

CVE-2015-8476 is a medium-severity command injection vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 16 Dec 2015. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Multiple CRLF injection vulnerabilities in PHPMailer before 5.2.14 allow attackers to inject arbitrary SMTP commands via CRLF sequences in an (1) email address to the validateAddress function in class.phpmailer.php or (2) SMTP command to the sendCommand function in class.smtp.php, a different vulnerability than CVE-2012-0796.

Weakness: CWE-20

Which versions are affected by CVE-2015-8476?

2 open source packages ship an affected version, including phpmailer/phpmailer. It affects 2 products.

Products include Debian Debian Linux, Phpmailer Project Phpmailer.

How do I fix CVE-2015-8476?

Upgrade phpmailer/phpmailer to 5.2.14 or later.

Upgrade, and pass arguments to programs as a list instead of through a shell. More about Command injection.

Is CVE-2015-8476 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2015-8476 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Debian Debian Linux

• CVE-2015-3306 ProFTPD Improper Access Control Exploited Critical 10.0
• CVE-2025-49113 RoundCube Webmail Deserialization of Untrusted Data Exploited Critical 9.9
• CVE-2026-24061 GNU InetUtils Argument Injection Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2025-39682 Linux Kernel Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2024-9680 Mozilla Firefox Use-After-Free Exploited Critical 9.8

All Debian Debian Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2015-8476, DLA-363-1, DSA-3416-1, GHSA-738m-f33v-qc2r, MGASA-2015-0484, UBUNTU-CVE-2015-8476.