Debian Security Advisory DSA 3104-1 (bsd-mailx - security update)

It was discovered that bsd-mailx, an implementation of the mail command, had an undocumented feature which treats syntactically valid email addresses as shell commands to execute. Users who need this feature can re-enable it using the expandaddr in an appropriate mailrc file. This update also removes the obsolete -T option. An older security vulnerability, CVE-2004-2771, had already been addressed in the Debian's bsd-mailx package. Note that this security update does not remove all mailx facilities for command execution, though. Scripts which send mail to addresses obtained from an untrusted source (such as a web form) should use the -- separator before the email addresses (which was fixed to work properly in this update), or they should be changed to invoke mail -t or sendmail -i -t instead, passing the recipient addresses as part of the mail header.

bsd-mailx on Debian Linux

This check tests the installed software version using the apt package manager.

For the stable distribution (wheezy), this problem has been fixed in version 8.1.2-0.20111106cvs-1+deb7u1. We recommend that you upgrade your bsd-mailx packages.