Critical Unpatched Flaw Disclosed in WordPress WooCommerce Extension

Apr 26, 2019

If you own an eCommerce website built on WordPress and powered
by WooCommerce plugin, then beware of a new, unpatched
vulnerability that has been made public and could allow attackers
to compromise your online store.

A WordPress security company—called “Plugin
Vulnerabilities“—that recently gone
rogue ^[1] in order to protest
against moderators of the WordPress’s official support forum has
once again dropped details ^[2] and
proof-of-concept exploit for a critical flaw in a widely-used
WordPress plugin.

To be clear, the reported unpatched vulnerability doesn’t reside
in the WordPress core or WooCommerce plugin itself.

Instead, the vulnerability exists in a plugin, called
WooCommerce Checkout Manager, that extends the functionality
of WooCommerce by allowing eCommerce sites to customize forms on
their checkout pages and is currently being used by more than
60,000 websites.
^[3]

The vulnerability in question is an “arbitrary file upload” issue
that can be exploited by unauthenticated, remote attackers if the
vulnerable sites have “Categorize Uploaded Files” option enabled
within WooCommerce Checkout Manager plugin settings.

“From the more technical aspect, vulnerability occurs inside
‘includes/admin.php’ file at line 2084 on which application is
moving given files to a directory using ‘move_uploaded_file’
without prior proper check for allowed files,” explains a blog post ^[4]
published Thursday by web application security platform WebARX, who
warned their users after Plugin Vulnerabilities made the flaw
public.

If exploited, the flaw could allow attackers to execute arbitrary
server-side script code in the context of the web server process
and compromise the application to access or modify data or gain
administrative access.

WooCommerce Checkout Manager version 4.2.6, which is the
latest available plugin at the time of writing, is vulnerable to
this issue.

If your WordPress website is using this plugin, you are advised
to either disable “Categorize Uploaded Files” option in the setting
or disable the plugin completely until a new patched version
becomes available.

This is not the first time when the company called Plugin
Vulnerabilities inappropriately disclosed an unpatched flaw in the
public.

The company has continuously been disclosing vulnerabilities in
various WordPress plugins since after they had issues with the
WordPress forum moderators.

Since at least past two years the team behind Plugin
Vulnerabilities has deliberately been releasing details of newly
discovered vulnerabilities directly on the WordPress Support forum,
instead of reporting them to the respective plugin authors
directly, violating the forum’s rules.

In response to this inappropriate behavior, the WordPress.org
moderators eventually blacklisted Plugin Vulnerabilities from their
official forum after multiple warnings and banning all their
accounts.

However, this did not stop Plugin Vulnerabilities, who since
then started disclosing details of new, unpatched WordPress plugin
vulnerabilities on their own website, putting the whole ecosystem,
websites and their users at risk.

References

^{^}
gone rogue
(medium.com)
^{^}
details
(www.pluginvulnerabilities.com)
^{^}
plugin
(wordpress.org)
^{^}
blog post
(www.webarxsecurity.com)

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OWASP TOP !0

Injection. Injection flaws, such as SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injection, occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization. Broken Authentication. Application functions related to authentication and session management are often implemented incorrectly, allowing attackers to compromise passwords, keys, or session tokens, or to exploit other implementation flaws to assume other users’ identities temporarily or permanently. Sensitive Data Exposure. Many web applications and APIs do not properly protect sensitive data, such as financial, healthcare, and PII. Attackers may steal or modify such weakly protected data to conduct credit card fraud, identity theft, or other crimes. Sensitive data may be compromised without extra protection, such as encryption at rest or in transit, and requires special precautions when exchanged with the browser. XML External Entities (XXE). Many older or poorly configured XML processors evaluate external entity references within XML documents. External entities can be used to disclose internal files using the file URI handler, internal file shares, internal port scanning, remote code execution, and denial of service attacks. Broken Access Control. Restrictions on what authenticated users are allowed to do are often not properly enforced. Attackers can exploit these flaws to access unauthorized functionality and/or data, such as access other users’ accounts, view sensitive files, modify other users’ data, change access rights, etc. Security Misconfiguration. Security misconfiguration is the most commonly seen issue. This is commonly a result of insecure default configurations, incomplete or ad hoc configurations, open cloud storage, misconfigured HTTP headers, and verbose error messages containing sensitive information. Not only must all operating systems, frameworks, libraries, and applications be securely configured, but they must be patched/upgraded in a timely fashion. Cross-Site Scripting XSS. XSS flaws occur whenever an application includes untrusted data in a new web page without proper validation or escaping, or updates an existing web page with user-supplied data using a browser API that can create HTML or JavaScript. XSS allows attackers to execute scripts in the victim’s browser which can hijack user sessions, deface web sites, or redirect the user to malicious sites. Insecure Deserialization. Insecure deserialization often leads to remote code execution. Even if deserialization flaws do not result in remote code execution, they can be used to perform attacks, including replay attacks, injection attacks, and privilege escalation attacks. Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities. Components, such as libraries, frameworks, and other software modules, run with the same privileges as the application. If a vulnerable component is exploited, such an attack can facilitate serious data loss or server takeover. Applications and APIs using components with known vulnerabilities may undermine application defenses and enable various attacks and impacts. Insufficient Logging & Monitoring. Insufficient logging and monitoring, coupled with missing or ineffective integration with incident response, allows attackers to further attack systems, maintain persistence, pivot to more systems, and tamper, extract, or destroy data. Most breach studies show time to detect a breach is over 200 days, typically detected by external parties rather than internal processes or monitoring.

Critical Unpatched Flaw Disclosed in WordPress WooCommerce Extension

References

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