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. Through that we caught a less serious variant of a local file inclusion (LFI) vulnerability, which allows for evaluating the  code in a specified file, in the plugin Social Share Buttons & Analytics by GetSocial.io. In this case through cross-site request forgery (CSRF) an attacker could cause a logged in Administrator to include cause a file with the .php extension to be included in the context of a WordPress page being loaded (so it could, for example, be used to access a plugin’s .php files that have code to restrict direct access to them).

The vulnerability has been in the plugin for four years without apparently being noticed. [Read more]