Every additional plugin that you add to your WordPress website adds additional security risk, that includes security plugins. Recently we did a quick check over plugins designed to allow you to keep track actions taken by users on your website. In several of cases we found rather minor security vulnerabilities. We found two related issues in the plugin User Activity Log due to a lack of protection against cross-site request forgery (CSRF).

A CSRF vulnerability involves causing someone to take an action they didn’t intend to. In the case of the first vulnerability in the plugin, if you could get an Administrator to visit a page you control you could cause them to in turn access the page /wp-admin/admin.php?page=general_settings_menu&db=reset, which would cause all logged activity to be deleted. You can see that the URL doesn’t contain a nonce, which is what is used to protect agains this type of vulnerability. This isn’t something that is likely to be exploited, but it is concern since it would make it easier for someone to erase some of the evidence of what malicious action they might have taken. [Read more]