Predictive Vulnerability Intelligence.

Product

  • Product
  • Pricing
  • Documentation

Company

  • About
  • Partnerships
  • Blog
  • Support

Legal

  • Terms
  • Privacy
  • Data Licensing

© 2026 FAUCET Technologies LLC. All rights reserved.

CVE-2021-38542

22
FAUCET Score

CVE-2021-38542 is a medium-severity buffering attack vulnerability affecting Apache James versions prior to 3.6.1. This flaw allows for Man-in-the-middle command injection attacks via the STARTTLS command, potentially leading to sensitive information leakage. The attack has a network vector and high attack complexity, but does not require user interaction or privileges. There is currently no evidence of active exploitation, public exploit code (Metasploit, Nuclei, ExploitDB), or significant community discussion or media coverage.

Impacted Technologies

VendorProductVersion(s)CPE
< 3.6.1CPE matchmatch criteria
cpe:2.3:a:apache:james:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*

CVSS Data

CVSS version used by this source: 3.1

5.9MEDIUM

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N

Attack Vector
NETWORK
Attack Complexity
HIGH
Privileges Required
NONE
User Interaction
NONE
Scope
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality Impact
HIGH
Integrity Impact
NONE
Availability Impact
NONE
Exploitability Score
2.2
Impact Score
3.6
CvssVersion
3.1

Exploit Intelligence

EPSS Score
2.35%
Probability of exploitation in next 30 days
EPSS Percentile
81.9%
Percentile rank of EPSS score among Peer Group
As of 2026-07-27
Model: v2026.06.15
This CVE's current EPSS score of 0.0235 is in the 71st percentile among its peer group of 19,956 CVEs.

Social Chatter

The average CVE in this peer group has 0.0 Twitter, 0.0 Reddit, 0.0 Bluesky, 0.0 Mastodon, and 0.2 GitHub mentions.

Media Mentions

No media coverage found for this CVE.

The average CVE in this peer group has 0.0 InfoSec Media, 0.0 Vendor Blog, and 0.0 Security Researcher mentions.

Remediation

Patch Available

Vendor Patches (1)

mavenpatch availablevia ghsa
Product: org.apache.james:james-serverFixed in: 3.6.1

Vendor Advisories (1)

mavenGHSA-84wg-rgp8-2hg4medium

Command Injection in Apache James

Jan 8, 2022

References

openwall.com / lists/oss-security/2022/01/04/1
Mailing ListThird Party Advisory
openwall.com / lists/oss-security/2022/01/04/1
Mailing ListThird Party Advisory
openwall.com / lists/oss-security/2022/09/20/1
Mailing ListThird Party Advisory