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posted by martyb on Monday February 18 2019, @05:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the anti-social-buttons dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A critical vulnerability in popular WordPress plugin Simple Social Buttons enables non-admin users to modify WordPress installation options – and ultimately take over websites.

Simple Social Buttons enables users to add social-media sharing buttons to various locations of their websites. The plugin has more than 40,000 active installations, according to WordPress Plugin repository.

[...] “Exploitation is fairly easy if the website allows public registrations, since the only requirement for an attacker to exploit this vulnerability is to have a registered user account,” Oliver Sild, founder and CEO of WebARX, told Threatpost. “It can be a low-privileged user whose only permission is to post a comment.”

[...] “Improper application design flow, chained with lack of permission check resulted in privilege-escalation and unauthorized actions in WordPress installation allowing non-admin users, even subscriber user type to modify WordPress installation options from the wp_options table,” Luka Sikic, developer and researcher with WebARX, said in a Monday post.

At a technical level, the flaw allows a function to iterate through a JSON object provided in the request and update all options – without checking whether the current user has permission to manage options for the plugin.

[...] From there, “there are multiple ways for an attacker to take over a whole website, or administrator account at least, just by modifying those configuration options,” Sild told Threatpost.

The vulnerability, which is rated 9.1 on the CVSS v3 severity scale, was discovered on Feb. 7, and a patch was released on Feb. 8. Users of the plugin are urged to update to version 2.0.22.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday February 18 2019, @07:24PM (7 children)

    by RS3 (6367) on Monday February 18 2019, @07:24PM (#803113)

    Very good point, but some of us like a little excitement in our lives. :)

    You know, beautiful day, you're half asleep, and suddenly the biggest fish that nobody will believe grabs the line. It's what you showed up for, but were enjoying the calm just the same.

    Didn't say I'm a php fan; in fact have barely coded much php; just fell into WP admin and 10 years and no problems yet.

    Besides perl, any language you'd recommend to replace php? (not saying I don't like perl, I just know you do a ton of perl)

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @09:21PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @09:21PM (#803190)

    Python. You can run it as a web server directly, a CGI script, FastCGI, SCGI, WSGI, and more. There are also a ton of frameworks and other prebuilt pieces that you can use to run your website and make it safe.

    • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday February 18 2019, @09:35PM

      by fyngyrz (6567) on Monday February 18 2019, @09:35PM (#803193) Journal

      Bah. Meant to moderate "Informative." Sorry.

      --
      Research shows that 6 out of 7 dwarves aren't happy.

  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday February 18 2019, @10:34PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday February 18 2019, @10:34PM (#803220)

    There are good options in both Python and Ruby. I've also had to wrangle both JSP and C#.Net, and neither of those were half as atrocious as PHP.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 19 2019, @12:36AM (1 child)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Tuesday February 19 2019, @12:36AM (#803272) Homepage Journal

    Anything you know well and can write quickly in. Preferably a scripting language but even compiled ones would be preferable to PHP. The language itself isn't actually quite as bad as people give it credit for but most of the code written in it, including libraries and frameworks like WP, is because of the culture of noobs that adopted it as their language of choice.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @03:37AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @03:37AM (#803328)

      There is a difference too in that PHP made the decision along the lines of "never break user space"; in that once a particular method is finalized, the behavior of that should not change. This results in programmers using wrong method calls all the time which lead to security holes. For example, the advice for using MySQL with PHP was to use escape_string(), but that didn't work right when used so it became, mysql_escape_string(), which had security flaws, so then it became mysql_real_escape_string(), but then that was wrong too, so they added other methods. So then, you have a bunch of people coding stuff using outdated advice. Noob or not, if everyone is telling you the "right way" to do something is wrong because the documentation and tutorials haven't caught up, then you are going to do it the wrong way too.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @02:30PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @02:30PM (#803464)

    Let perl die already.