CVE-2024-53860 is a high-severity (CVSS 8.6) CWE-74 vulnerability in spencer14420/sp-php-email-handler. A fix is available for spencer14420/sp-php-email-handler — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Potential Abuse for Sending Arbitrary Emails in sp-php-email-handler
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2024-53860.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
Where this sits among everything scored
Real-World Exposure
spencer14420/sp-php-email-handlerReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects Packagist packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
sp-php-email-handler is a PHP package for handling contact form submissions. Messages sent using this script are vulnerable to abuse, as the script allows anybody to specify arbitrary email recipients and include user-provided content in confirmation emails. This could enable malicious actors to use your server to send spam, phishing emails, or other malicious content, potentially damaging your domain's reputation and leading to blacklisting by email providers. Patched in version 1.0.0 by removing user-provided content from confirmation emails. All pre-release versions (alpha and beta) are vulnerable to this issue and should not be used. There are no workarounds for this issue. Users must upgrade to version 1.0.0 to mitigate the vulnerability.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐘Packagist | spencer14420/sp-php-email-handler | all versions | 1.0.0composer require spencer14420/sp-php-email-handler:^1.0.0 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for spencer14420/sp-php-email-handler, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update spencer14420/sp-php-email-handler to 1.0.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2024-53860 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2024-53860 in your dependencies?
Find it across Packagist, including transitive dependencies.