CVE-2023-51321 in Night Club Booking Software
Summary
by MITRE • 02/20/2025
A lack of rate limiting in the 'Forgot Password' feature of PHPJabbers Night Club Booking Software v1.0 allows attackers to send an excessive amount of email for a legitimate user, leading to a possible Denial of Service (DoS) via a large amount of generated e-mail messages.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 03/07/2026
The vulnerability identified as CVE-2023-51321 resides within the PHPJabbers Night Club Booking Software version 1.0, specifically targeting the 'Forgot Password' functionality. This weakness represents a critical security flaw that directly impacts the software's ability to maintain service availability and prevent abuse. The absence of proper rate limiting mechanisms in this authentication recovery feature creates an exploitable condition that adversaries can leverage for malicious purposes.
The technical implementation flaw stems from the software's failure to enforce any form of rate limiting or request throttling on the password reset functionality. When legitimate users attempt to recover their accounts through the forgot password mechanism, the system processes each request without any controls on the frequency or volume of emails generated. This design oversight allows attackers to repeatedly submit password reset requests for the same user account or multiple accounts, resulting in an exponential increase in email traffic.
From an operational perspective, this vulnerability enables attackers to conduct denial of service attacks against both the targeted service and potentially the email infrastructure. The excessive email generation can overwhelm mail servers, consume bandwidth resources, and potentially trigger spam detection mechanisms that could affect legitimate communications. The impact extends beyond simple service disruption as it can also lead to increased operational costs, email deliverability issues, and potential blacklisting of the affected domain.
The vulnerability aligns with CWE-307, which addresses inadequate protection against excessive authentication attempts, and represents a classic example of a rate limiting failure that can be exploited for denial of service attacks. According to ATT&CK framework, this weakness maps to T1499.004, which covers network denial of service attacks through resource exhaustion, and T1110.003, which involves credential stuffing or password spraying techniques that can be amplified through this vulnerability. The attack surface is particularly concerning as it requires minimal technical expertise to exploit and can cause significant operational disruption.
Mitigation strategies should focus on implementing robust rate limiting mechanisms that restrict the number of password reset requests per user account within a specific time window. The system should enforce exponential backoff mechanisms and implement account lockout procedures after excessive failed attempts. Additionally, implementing CAPTCHA verification, IP address monitoring, and anomaly detection systems can help identify and prevent automated abuse of the feature. Organizations should also consider implementing multi-factor authentication as an additional security layer to reduce the overall risk associated with password reset functionality. Proper logging and monitoring of authentication attempts will enable administrators to detect and respond to potential abuse attempts before they escalate into full denial of service conditions.