Critical Flaw Uncovered in WordPress Backup Plugin Used by Over 3 Million Sites

Patches have been issued to contain a “severe” security
vulnerability in UpdraftPlus, a WordPress plugin with over three
million installations, that can be weaponized to download the
site’s private data using an account on the vulnerable sites.

“All versions of UpdraftPlus from March 2019 onwards have
contained a vulnerability caused by a missing permissions-level
check, allowing untrusted users access to backups,” the maintainers
of the plugin said in an advisory published this week.

Security researcher Marc-Alexandre Montpas of Automattic has
been credited with discovering and reporting the vulnerability on
February 14 that’s been assigned the identifier CVE-2022-0633^[1]
(CVSS score: 8.5). The issue impacts UpdraftPlus versions from
1.16.7 to 1.22.2.

UpdraftPlus is a backup and restoration solution^[2] that’s capable of
performing full, manual, or scheduled backups of WordPress files,
databases, plugins and themes, which can then be reinstated via the
WordPress admin dashboard^[3].

A consequence of this defect^[4]
is that it allows any logged-in user on a WordPress installation
with UpdraftPlus installed to exercise the privilege of downloading
an existing backup – permissions which should have been reserved
for administrative users only.

Beyond leaking passwords and other confidential data, it could
also “in some cases site takeover if the attacker is able to obtain
database credentials from a configuration file and successfully
access the site database,” WordPress security company Wordfence
said^[5].

Users of the UpdraftPlus plugin are recommended to update to
version 1.22.3 (or 2.22.3 for the Premium version) to mitigate any
potential exploitation. The latest version available as of February
17 is 1.22.4, which addresses bugs related to printing auto-backup
options on PHP 8.