28 Feb 2020

Vulnerability Details: Settings Change Vulnerability in WP Security Audit Log

The plugin WP Security Audit Log was closed on the WordPress Plugin Directory yesterday. That is one of the 1,000 most popular plugins with 100,000+ installs, so we were alerted to its closure. When we went to check on the plugin to see if we should be warning users of the plugin that also use our service of anything, we found that it had been updated and the changelog was this:


[Read more]

26 Feb 2019

Hackers Are Probably Already Exploiting This Authenticated Option Update Vulnerability Just Fixed in Freemius

On Sunday we had probing on our website for usage of the plugin WP Security Audit Log, which has 80,000+ installs according to wordpress.org, from what looked to be hackers. Considering that plugin is known to vulnerable we didn’t further check in to what was going on, which was a mistake, but one that other monitoring we do allowed us to rectify today.

As part of our daily monitoring of subversion log messages from the WordPress Plugin Directory for mentions of security fixes, we found that 10 plugins had mentions of security fixes yesterday, which is way out of line with what we normally see and hinted that there might be a common issue between the plugins. As we started trying to figure out what was going on, we noticed that many of them were updating a third-party library Freemius, which is described as  a”[m]onetization, analytics, and marketing automation platform”. In looking in to that we noticed that Freemius was citing WP Security Audit Log as using their library. With one of those plugins, looking at the changes made, we saw the possibility that a major vulnerability had been fixed. Further checking confirmed that an authenticated option update vulnerability was fixed, which would allow anyone with access to a WordPress account to take over a website and is a type of vulnerability hackers have tried to exploit widely in the past so there is likely to be plenty of attempts due to this. [Read more]

13 Nov 2018

Full Disclosure of Authenticated PHP Object Injection Vulnerability in WordPress Security Plugin with 70,000+ Installs

Last week, after running across a couple of PHP object injection vulnerabilities in the plugin WP GDPR Compliance we started looking into making an improvement of detection of that type of issue in our automated tool for detecting possible security issues in WordPress plugins, the Plugin Security Checker. As part of doing that we did some checks over the 1,000 most popular WordPress plugins to get a better idea of usage of code of similar code there might be out there. That led to us finding an authenticated PHP object injection vulnerability in the security plugin WP Security Audit Log, which has 70,000+ active installations according to wordpress.org.

That a security plugin can have a fairly serious vulnerability speaks to the one of the problems we see with the security industry’s ability to meet the needs of the public. On the one hand the average website, which shouldn’t need security products and services, are being sold ones that don’t work well at best. At the same time those websites that genuinely need advanced security tools are unable to get ones that work well and or they introduce security risks of their own. This plugin falls into the latter category both in that it is something that could be of useful for some websites, but also something that is introducing additional security risk. [Read more]

27 Jun 2016

Reflected Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Vulnerability in WP Security Audit Log

When it comes to the poor state web security a big culprit is security companies, who don’t seem to either know or care that that much about security in many cases. So it isn’t wasn’t that surprising that we found a security company would have a WordPress plugin with a security vulnerability due to failure to take a basic security measure the other day, but the situation is a good reminder that services you get from security companies are not also honestly sold.

We recently did a quick security check of security plugins that generate a log of activity in admin area of WordPress. One of the ones we found a security issue with is WP Security Audit Log, which is developed by WP White Security. [Read more]