CVE-2010-20103: ProFTPD

Critical severity, CVSS 9.8. EPSS: 13.7% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

A malicious backdoor was embedded in the official ProFTPD 1.3.3c source tarball distributed between November 28 and December 2, 2010. The backdoor implements a hidden FTP command trigger that, when invoked, causes the server to execute arbitrary shell commands with root privileges. This allows remote, unauthenticated attackers to run any OS command on the FTP server host.

Affected products

• ProFTPD ProFTPD: version 1.3.3 only

Published 2025-08-20. Last modified 2026-07-15.