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Plugin Vulnerabilities

A service to protect your site against vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins.

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Tag Archives: Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)/PHP Object Injection

18 Mar

Missed Vulnerabilities in Easy WP SMTP Show Why Checking Over Security Fixes is Important

One of the things that we do to make sure we are providing our customers with the best data on vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins they might be using is that we monitor the changelog for plugins to spot the possibility that vulnerabilities have been fixed and then we try to figure if the changes actually involve a vulnerability. In doing that we have often found that vulnerabilities have only been partially fixed or haven’t been fixed at all. That is the case with the plugin Easy WP SMTP, which has 300,000+ active installations according to wordpress.org, where we reviewed the changes made before the discoverer had put out a post on the vulnerabilities.

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14 Nov

Full Disclosure of CSRF/PHP Object Injection Vulnerability in WordPress Theme with 70,000+ Installs

With our service we cover WordPress plugins (as you might guess from our name), but not WordPress themes. There are a number of reasons for that, including the dearth of vulnerabilities being disclosed in themes, which seems to be related to the limited amount of potentially vulnerable code in them despite it being possible for them to contain all the same types of issues as plugins. We got a reminder of that when we did a check over some of the most popular themes available in the WordPress Theme Directory against the checks we do of changes being made to plugins as part of our proactive monitoring to try to catch serious vulnerabilities before they are exploited and a few other checks. The proactive monitoring checks didn’t pull up anything, but one of the other checks brought up the fact that the theme Hueman , which has 70,000+ active installs according to wordpress.org, contains the plugin OptionTree.

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25 Oct

Full Disclosure of Authenticated PHP Object Injection Vulnerability in WordPress Plugin With 50,000+ Active Installs

One of the things we have found while looking at the results of our automated tool for identifying possible security issues in WordPress plugins, the Plugin Security Checker, is that minor possible vulnerabilities that it can identify can be good indications that there are broader issues with security in a plugin. That is the case with the plugin Give, which has 50,000+ active installations according to wordpress.org.

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10 Aug

Our Proactive Monitoring Caught an Authenticated PHP Object Injection Vulnerability in a Brand New Plugin

One of the ways we help to improve the security of WordPress plugins, not just for our customers, but for everyone using them, is the proactive monitoring of changes made to plugins in the Plugin Directory to try to catch serious vulnerabilities before they are exploited. That sometimes leads to us catching a vulnerability of a more limited variant of one of those serious vulnerability types, which isn’t as much concern for the average website, but could be utilized in a targeted attack. That happened with the authenticated PHP object injection vulnerability we found in a brand new plugin, Woocommerce Aliexpress Dropshipping Lite. This vulnerability could allow an attacker that had access to a WordPress account to exploit a PHP object injection vulnerability. It also could have allowed an attacker that could get a user logged in to WordPress to visit a URL the attacker controls, to exploit the vulnerability as well.

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27 Apr

Our Proactive Monitoring Caught a Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)/PHP Object Injection Vulnerability in WP Docs

One of the ways we help to improve the security of WordPress plugins, not just for our customers, but for everyone using them, is the proactive monitoring of changes made to plugins in the Plugin Directory to try to catch serious vulnerabilities. That sometimes leads to us catching a vulnerability of a more limited variant of one of those serious vulnerability types, which isn’t as much concern for the average website, but could be utilized in a targeted attack. That happened with the cross-site request forgery (CSRF)/PHP object injection vulnerability we found in the plugin WP Docs. This vulnerability could have allowed an attacker that could get a logged in Administrator to visit a URL the attacker controls, to unintentionally exploit a PHP object injection vulnerability.

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12 Mar

Our Proactive Monitoring Caught a Authenticated PHP Object Injection Vulnerability in bbPress Move Topics

One of the ways we help to improve the security of WordPress plugins, not just for our customers, but for everyone using them, is the proactive monitoring of changes made to plugins in the Plugin Directory to try to catch serious vulnerabilities. That sometimes leads to us catching a vulnerability of a more limited variant of one of those serious vulnerability types, which isn’t as much concern for the average website, but could be utilized in a targeted attack. That happened with the authenticated PHP object injection vulnerability we found in the plugin bbPress Move Topics. This vulnerability could have allowed an attacker that had access to a WordPress account of contributor level or above to exploit a PHP object injection vulnerability. It also could have allowed an attacker that could get a user logged in as a Contributor-level or above to visit a URL the attacker controls, to exploit the vulnerability as well.

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06 Oct

Authenticated PHP Object Injection Vulnerability in Event List

Since June we have been doing proactive monitoring of changes made to plugins to try to catch serious vulnerabilities. So far that has lead to identifying existing vulnerabilities, newly introduced vulnerabilities, newly introduced vulnerabilities in brand new plugins, and vulnerabilities being fixed. For the first time it has lead to us identifying a vulnerability in a plugin that has been removed from the Plugin Directory. It appears the plugin has been through at least one review by the Plugin Directory team that doesn’t look to have caught this vulnerability. That in itself it is not major concern, but the fact that there doesn’t appear to be any publicly available info on the review process, which others could review and then provide suggestions for improvements that could be made, is more of an concern.

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25 Sep

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)/PHP Object Injection Vulnerability in Shoppable Images Lite

Back in June we introduced a new feature to our service where we are trying to proactively catch some serious vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins. The original idea was to catch vulnerabilities as they are newly introduced to the plugin, but when we started working on doing that we realized that it would also catch existing vulnerabilities if they were in code being changed in a plugin. At the end of August, for the first time we caught a serious vulnerability as it was introduced in to a plugin. For the second instance of that occurring, which happened the next week, not only did we catch a vulnerability as it was introduced, but with the first version of the plugin. That should be a good reminder that the review done before a plugin is allowed in to the Plugin Directory does not insure that the plugin is secure at the time it is introduced.

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08 Sep

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)/PHP Object Injection Vulnerability in BackupBuddy

Back in June we introduced a new feature to the service where we are proactively monitor changes made to plugins to try to catch serious vulnerabilities in plugins. To do that we first identify possible vulnerable code running a series of regular expressions over the changes being made to plugins in the Plugin Directory and then we manually check over any results that we haven’t previously reviewed. We recently have been seeing if doing that with the plugins installed in websites that we are doing hack cleanups of would be useful. Through that we found a cross-site request forgery (CSRF)/PHP object injection vulnerability in BackupBuddy, which is exploitable in multisite based WordPress installs.

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