CAPEC-50

Password Recovery Exploitation

High severityMedium likelihoodStandard pattern

An attacker may take advantage of the application feature to help users recover their forgotten passwords in order to gain access into the system with the same privileges as the original user. Generally password recovery schemes tend to be weak and insecure.

On this page

Ask an AI about this attack pattern
How the attack unfolds
Prerequisites
Skills required
Resources required
Signs of an attack
Consequences
Mitigations
Weaknesses it exploits
Related attack patterns
Examples

Most of them use only one security question. For instance, mother's maiden name tends to be a fairly popular one. Unfortunately in many cases this information is not very hard to find, especially if the attacker knows the legitimate user. These generic security questions are also re-used across many applications, thus making them even more insecure. An attacker could for instance overhear a coworker talking to a bank representative at the work place and supplying their mother's maiden name for verification purposes. An attacker can then try to log in into one of the victim's accounts, click on "forgot password" and there is a good chance that the security question there will be to provide mother's maiden name. A weak password recovery scheme totally undermines the effectiveness of a strong password scheme.

Ask an AI about this attack pattern

ChatGPT Claude Google AI Mode

Show the prompt

Explain the attack pattern CAPEC-50: Password Recovery Exploitation: how it unfolds, what it needs and how to prevent and detect it in my systems. Use https://capec.mitre.org/data/definitions/50.html and https://cve.bz/cve/capec/50?via=ask-ai-copy, which lists recent CVEs with the weaknesses it exploits. Cite the sources.

Opens a third-party assistant; its answer is its own, not cve.bz's. The prompt holds only this attack pattern's id and public links.

How the attack unfolds

Explore
The attacker looks for a way in.
1. Understand the password recovery mechanism and how it works.
Exploit
They carry out the attack.
1. Find a weakness in the password recovery mechanism and exploit it. For instance, a weakness may be that a standard single security question is used with an easy to determine answer.

Prerequisites

The system allows users to recover their passwords and gain access back into the system.
Password recovery mechanism has been designed or implemented insecurely.
Password recovery mechanism relies only on something the user knows and not something the user has.
No third party intervention is required to use the password recovery mechanism.

Skills required

Low skill
Brute force attack
Medium skill
Social engineering and more sophisticated technical attacks.

Resources required

For a brute force attack one would need a machine with sufficient CPU, RAM and HD.

Signs of an attack

Many incorrect attempts to answer the security question.

Consequences

What a successful attack can lead to
Impact	Affects	Note
Gain Privileges	Confidentiality, Access Control, Authorization

Mitigations

Use multiple security questions (e.g. have three and make the user answer two of them correctly). Let the user select their own security questions or provide them with choices of questions that are not generic.
E-mail the temporary password to the registered e-mail address of the user rather than letting the user reset the password online.
Ensure that your password recovery functionality is not vulnerable to an injection style attack.

Weaknesses it exploits

CWE-522 Insufficiently Protected Credentials
CWE-640 Weak Password Recovery Mechanism for Forgotten Password

Recent CVEs with these weaknesses

–CVE-2026-978672026-11-10
The EJBd remote protocol returns datasource connection details, including database credentials, to remote clients that look up a datasource. A remote client able to reach the EJBd endpoint can obtain the database credentials and connect to…
8.7CVE-2026-600462026-11-10
An unauthenticated remote attacker can perform password resets for any user with known username and email without rate limiting. This can result in a total loss of availabilit since the password will be reseted.
6.0CVE-2026-891252026-11-10
Due to Insecure Storage of Sensitive Information in SAP Web Dispatcher and Internet Communication Manager, an attacker with administrative privileges could obtain sensitive information from stored data. This may allow correlation of creden…
6.9CVE-2026-1250742026-11-09
A flaw has been found in SourceCodester Smart Attendance System with QR Code Scanner 1.0. This affects an unknown function of the file reset_password.php of the component Password Reset. This manipulation of the argument username/password …
7.1CVE-2026-1153402026-11-09
Progress Software WS_FTP Server versions prior to 2025.0.5 on Windows may write sensitive user credential and session data to a temporary file during file transfer operations.
6.6CVE-2026-1121642026-11-09
The LaserGest mobile application encrypts stored assistance portal credentials with a hardcoded AES key and IV, allowing an attacker with access to the application package to recover them in cleartext.
6.3CVE-2026-1184592026-11-09
A time-derived emergency password can be derived from publicly available application code, enabling authentication without legitimate credentials.
–CVE-2026-1114522026-11-09
Apache Airflow's secrets masker matched sensitive key names only in their snake_case form, so values stored under camelCase keys such as `privateKey`, `connectionString`, `webhookUrl` or `accessKey` — for example in a Connection's extra or…

The newest records naming one of them. Each weakness's page lists them all.

Part of: CAPEC-212 Functionality Misuse
Can lead to: CAPEC-600 Credential Stuffing
CAPEC-151 Identity Spoofing
CAPEC-560 Use of Known Domain Credentials
CAPEC-561 Windows Admin Shares with Stolen Credentials
CAPEC-653 Use of Known Operating System Credentials

Examples

An attacker clicks on the "forgot password" and is presented with a single security question. The question is…

An attacker clicks on the "forgot password" and is presented with a single security question. The question is regarding the name of the first dog of the user. The system does not limit the number of attempts to provide the dog's name. An attacker goes through a list of 100 most popular dog names and finds the right name, thus getting the ability to reset the password and access the system.

phpBanner Exchange is a PHP script (using the mySQL database) that facilitates the running of a banner exchan…

phpBanner Exchange is a PHP script (using the mySQL database) that facilitates the running of a banner exchange without extensive knowledge of PHP or mySQL.

A SQL injection was discovered in the password recovery module of the system that allows recovering an arbitrary user's password and taking over their account. The problem is due to faulty input sanitization in the phpBannerExchange, specifically the e-mail address of the user which is requested by the password recovery module.

The e-mail address requested by the password recovery module on the resetpw.php page. That e-mail address is validated with the following regular expression:

if(!eregi("^[_a-z0-9-]+(\.[_a-z0-9-]+)*@[a-z0-9-]+(\.[a-z0-9-]+)*
  (\.[a-z]{2,3})$", $email)){

A bug in the implementation of eregi() allows to pass additional character using a null byte "\0". Since eregi() is implemented in C, the variable $email is treated as a zero-terminated string. All characters following the Null Byte will not be recognized by the regular expression. So an e-mail address can be provided that includes the special character " ' " to break the SQL query below (and it will not be rejected by the regular expression because of the null byte trick). So a SQL injection becomes possible:

$get_info=mysql_query("select * from banneruser where
  email='$email' ");

This query will return a non-zero result set even though the email supplied (attacker's email) is not in the database.

Then a new password for the user is generated and sent to the $email address, an e-mail address controlled by the attacker. An attacker can then log in into the system.