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 again has lead to us catching a vulnerability of a type that hackers are likely to exploit if they know about it. Since the check used to spot this is also included in our Plugin Security Checker (which  is now accessible through a WordPress plugin of its own), it is another of reminder of how that can help to indicate which plugins are in greater need of security review (for which we do as part of our service as well as separately).

In the plugin Swift Help Desk Support Software Ticketing System (Help Desk & Knowledgebase Software) the value of a cookie is passed through the unserialize() function, which could lead to PHP object injection. That occurs in two shortcodes accessed functions in the plugin. One of them being swift_helpdesk_support_callback(), which is located in the file /sections/shd-shortcodes.php. Some ways into the function it checks if the cookie “sc_lead_scoring” exists and then unserializes its value: [Read more]