We recently have been trying to get an idea of how effective it would be to try to proactively catch some vulnerabilities when changes are made to WordPress plugins that include those vulnerabilities. In doing one of the preliminary checks we immediately came across a reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that exists in the plugin Product Catalog that has existed since its first version was released nearly four years ago.

Contrary the scaremongering we have seen from other web security companies this type of vulnerability isn’t a major concern as we don’t see hackers trying to exploit it on a large scale and all major web browsers other than Firefox have filtering that would need to be evaded to make it work. At the same this type of vulnerability shouldn’t be remaining in a plugin that long as it involves a failure of security at a fairly basic level and in the form it was here, easy to detect.

The vulnerability occurs in the file /html/CatalogueDetails.php on line 44:

<form id="nav-menu-meta" action="admin.php?page=UPCP-options&Action=UPCP_Catalogue_Details&Selected=Catalogue&Catalogue_ID=<?php echo $_GET['Catalogue_ID']; ?>#Catalogues" class="nav-menu-meta" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">

The value of GET input “Catalogue_ID” is output without being escaped, which could permit malicious JavaScript on to the page.

We notified the developer of the issue a week ago, we haven’t heard back from them and while the plugins has been updated since then, the vulnerability hasn’t been fixed.

Proof of Concept

The following proof of concept will cause any available cookies to be shown in alert box. Major web browsers other than Firefox provide XSS filtering, so this proof of concept will not work in those web browsers.

Make sure to replace “[path to WordPress]” with the location of WordPress.

http://[path to WordPress]/wp-admin/admin.php?page=UPCP-options&Action=UPCP_Catalogue_Details&Selected=Catalogue&Catalogue_ID=%22%3E%3Cscript%3Ealert%28document.cookie%29%3B%3C%2Fscript%3E

Timeline

• June 15, 2017 – Developer notified.

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