The Remote Code Execution vulnerability Apache Structs 2.x which was discovered July 17th appears to be seen more often as reported by sans last week. A bulletin detailing exploit attempts targeting this vulnerability has been seen lately by sans.
The CVE identified for this issue is CVE-2013-2251. It’s a high critical remote code execution which has to be considered seriously by the developers.
As per Apache “The Struts 2 DefaultActionMapper supports a method for short-circuit navigation state changes by prefixing parameters with “action:” or “redirect:”, followed by a desired navigational target expression. This mechanism was intended to help with attaching navigational information to buttons within forms.
In Struts 2 before 2.3.15.1 the information following “action:”, “redirect:” or “redirectAction:” is not properly sanitized. Since said information will be evaluated as OGNL expression against the value stack, this introduces the possibility to inject server side code “
Link to SANS : http://isc.sans.edu/diary/CVE-2013-2251+Apache+Struts+2.X+OGNL+Vulnerability/16382
