A flaw was found in the way curl handled telnet protocol option for sending environment variables, which could lead to sending of uninitialized data from a stack-based buffer to the server. This issue leads to potentially revealing sensitive internal information to the server using a clear-text network protocol.

A malicious server can use the PASV response to trick curl into connecting back to a given IP address and port, and this way potentially make curl extract information about services that are otherwise private and not disclosed, for example doing port scanning and service banner extractions. If curl operates on a URL provided by a user (which by all means is an unwise setup), a user can exploit that and pass in a URL to a malicious FTP server instance without needing any server breach to perform the attack.