Repeating a frequent recent pattern, once again when looking to see if the discoverer of a vulnerability in a WordPress plugin had put out a report on it we instead found a competing data source for data on vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins, the WPScan Vulnerability Database, claiming a vulnerability had been fixed, when it hadn’t. Compounding that problem, others repeated that claim, as they do with all of WPScan’s data, but without disclosing where the data is coming from or its well known quality control issues. This instance of that also is a good example of where security providers continuously looking to improve what they are doing, instead of continually failing in the same way, helps to improve other parts of what they are doing.

The changelog for the latest version of the plugin Gallery PhotoBlocks is “[Security] Fixed security issue”. Looking at the changes made in it we saw what looked to be fixing a reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability. That should have been something that could have been detected by our Plugin Security Checker, which is a tool that allows checking WordPress plugins for the possibility of some instances of security issues. So we ran the previous version of the plugin through that to make sure it picked that up and found that there were two instances of that:

 

There was no change made related to the second one in the new version of the plugin and as the proof of concept below shows, it is a vulnerability. In fact both the fixed and unfixed code runs when accessing the relevant admin page in WordPress, so it seems hard to miss this, yet it was for the WPScan Vulnerability Database:

Full Disclosure

Due to the moderators of the WordPress Support Forum’s continued inappropriate behavior we are full disclosing vulnerabilities in protest until WordPress gets that situation cleaned up, so we are releasing this post and then leaving a message about that for the developer through the WordPress Support Forum. You can notify the developer of this issue on the forum as well. Hopefully the moderators will finally see the light and clean up their act soon, so these full disclosures will no longer be needed (we hope they end soon). You would think they would have already done that, but considering that they believe that having plugins, which have millions installs, remain in the Plugin Directory despite them knowing they are vulnerable is “appropriate action”, something is very amiss with them (which is even more reason the moderation needs to be cleaned up).

Update: To clear up the confusion where developers claim we hadn’t tried to notify them through the Support Forum (while at the same time moderators are complaining about us doing just that), here is the message we left for this vulnerability:

Is It Fixed?

If you are reading this post down the road the best way to find out if this vulnerability or other WordPress plugin vulnerabilities in plugins you use have been fixed is to sign up for our service, since what we uniquely do when it comes to that type of data is to test to see if vulnerabilities have really been fixed. Relying on the developer’s information, can lead you astray, as we often find that they believe they have fixed vulnerabilities, but have failed to do that.

Proof of Concept

The following proof of concept will cause any available cookies to be shown in an alert box, when logged in as an Administrator. 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=photoblocks-edit&id="><script>alert(document.cookie);</script>

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