Login

Tag Archives: Resume Submissions & Job Postings

17 Mar 2016

Persistent Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Vulnerability in Resume Submissions & Job Postings

Our second publicly disclosed vulnerability report follows our first in that in both cases we found the vulnerabilities while reviewing reports of another vulnerability, which might be a good indication of the state security for WordPress plugins. In this case, while we trying to trying to set up plugin Resume Submissions & Job Postings plugin to test the vulnerability we ran across a forum post indicating that was some form of cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the resume form. After a little testing we were able to confirm there was in fact a persistent XSS vulnerability in the plugin.

Another thing worth noting with this is the importance of testing out vulnerabilities instead of just looking at the code (something we see in some of the false reports of vulnerabilities we have looked at), as the following code shows. Below are the lines that take user input from a resume submission and bring it into the plugin: [Read more]

17 Mar 2016

The Need For WordPress Plugin Vulnerability Fixes To Be Tested

With our service we don’t throw new reported vulnerabilities in to our data, we actually test out each vulnerability. That means we can tell you which versions are vulnerable, we can exclude false reports of vulnerabilities, and probably most importantly determine if the vulnerability has actually been fixed. The last one is big distinction between us and other similar services. It also help to improve the security of the WordPress ecosystem, because if we don’t do it, it doesn’t look in many cases that anyone else will, as an unfixed vulnerability from 2012 we recently ran across shows.

Recently our monitoring of attempts to exploit WordPress plugins on a live website showed some requests for the file /wp-content/plugins/resume-submissions-job-postings/installer.php. The attempts appeared as part of series of requests for files from various WordPress plugins and it looked like the files being requested might be an attempt to determine if the plugins were installed to then exploit. Looking around we couldn’t find any references to a vulnerability that exploited that file in the Resume Submissions & Job Postings plugin, but we did find a report of an arbitrary file upload vulnerability in the plugin from July of 2012. That is one of the more series vulnerabilities out there, since unlike many others, this type of vulnerability is frequently exploited. In the report the vulnerability was listed as having existed in version 2.5.1. On the plugins changelog entry for version 2.5.2, the first item seems to indicate that the vulnerability had been fixed as it was “Fixed: Attachment security vulnerability“. [Read more]