In this part, I will cover the initial steps, thoughts, and problems I had while attacking LAN Messenger.

I decided to attack LAN Messenger because it was an application which I had used previously and I already found a remote DoS exploit accidentally while poking around with netcat.

According to the SourceForge repository, LAN Messenger was last updated in 2012 (version 1.2.35) which gave me hope that there were some bugs that could be easily exploited. As this was a task meant for practice, I tried to avoid “spoilers”, however I later discovered that there were only two reported vulnerabilities issued CVEs. Both ended up being DoS bugs, one of which I already found anyway and the other doesn’t really make sense and claims to be for a version that doesn’t exist.

Despite there only being two CVEs, I was also very interested in a comment on the SourceForge page by a user claiming that there was a known XSS actively being exploited in the program as well. Despite the initially confusing comment which referenced an Exploit-DB ID for a completely different product, an XSS polyglot eventually did uncover the bug. After several more Google searches, I finally discovered a 2012 PoC from Vulnerability Laboratory that described the XSS, although the URL encoding suggested caused the bug not to trigger on my test machine.

Sometime during testing I discovered that LAN Messenger was forked to a project on GitHub as version 1.2.39.