CVE-2025-34489

GFI MailEssentials prior to version 21.8 is vulnerable to a local privilege escalation issue. A local attacker can escalate to NT Authority/SYSTEM by sending a crafted serialized payload to a .NET Remoting Service.

Weakness

The product deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently ensuring that the resulting data will be valid.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• Make fields transient to protect them from deserialization.
• An attempt to serialize and then deserialize a class containing transient fields will result in NULLs where the transient data should be. This is an excellent way to prevent time, environment-based, or sensitive variables from being carried over and used improperly.

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/586.html

References

• https://frycos.github.io/vulns4free/2025/04/28/mailessentials.html
• https://gfi.ai/products-and-solutions/network-security-solutions/mailessentials/resources/documentation/product-releases