CVE-2024-38360 Denial of service via Watched Words in Discourse
A moderator can cause denial of service by creating replacement words with excessive characters, impacting Discourse instance availability.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- An administrator
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2024-38360?
CVE-2024-38360 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Discourse Discourse, published on 15 Jul 2024. An attacker needs administrator access to exploit it, with no action from the victim.
Official description
Discourse is an open source platform for community discussion. In affected versions by creating replacement words with an almost unlimited number of characters, a moderator can reduce the availability of a Discourse instance. This issue has been addressed in stable version 3.2.3 and in current betas. Users are advised to upgrade. Users unable to upgrade may manually remove the long watched words either via SQL or Rails console.
Weakness: CWE-400
Which versions are affected by CVE-2024-38360?
1 open source package ship an affected version, including discourse. It affects 1 product.
| Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
discourse Bitnami | All versions | 3.2.3 |
Products include Discourse Discourse.
How do I fix CVE-2024-38360?
Upgrade discourse to 3.2.3 or later.
Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.
Is CVE-2024-38360 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2024-38360 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Discourse Discourse
- CVE-2021-41163 RCE via malicious SNS subscription payload
- CVE-2022-36066 Discourse vulnerable to RCE via admins uploading maliciously zipped file
- CVE-2022-39356 Discourse user account takeover via email and invite link
- CVE-2023-22468 Discourse vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting in local oneboxes
- CVE-2026-27934 Discourse leaks private topic title and post excerpt via user action API endpoint
Sources
Also known as BIT-discourse-2024-38360, GHSA-68pm-hm8x-pq2p.