Flaw in Elementor and Beaver Addons Let Anyone Hack WordPress Sites

Dec 13, 2019

Attention WordPress users!

Your website could easily get hacked if you are using
“Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder,” or “Ultimate Addons
for Elementor” and haven’t recently updated them to the latest
available versions.

Security researchers have discovered a critical yet
easy-to-exploit authentication bypass vulnerability in both
widely-used premium WordPress plugins that could allow remote
attackers to gain administrative access to sites without requiring
any password.

What’s more worrisome is that opportunistic attackers have
already started exploiting this vulnerability in the wild within 2
days of its discovery in order to compromise vulnerable WordPress
websites and install a malicious backdoor for later access.

Both vulnerable plugins, made by software development company
Brainstorm Force, are currently powering over hundreds of thousands
of WordPress websites using Elementor and Beaver Builder
frameworks, helping website admins and designers extend the
functionality of their websites with more widgets, modules, page
templates.

Discovered by researchers at web security service MalCare ^[1], the vulnerability
resides in the way both plugins let WordPress account holders,
including administrators, authenticate via Facebook and Google
login mechanisms.

Image credit: WebARX

According to the vulnerability’s advisory, due to lack of checks in
the authentication method when a user login via Facebook or Google,
vulnerable plugins can be tricked into allowing malicious users to
login as any other targeted user without requiring any password.

“However, the Facebook and Google authentication methods did not
verify the token returned by Facebook and Google, and since they
don’t require a password, there was no password check,” explained ^[2]
WebARX researchers, who also analysed the flaw and confirmed its
active exploitation.

“To exploit the vulnerability, the hacker needs to use the email ID
of an admin user of the site. In most cases, this information can
be retrieved fairly easily,” MalCare said.

In an email to The Hacker News, WebARX confirmed that attackers are
abusing this flaw to install a fake SEO stats plugin after
uploading a tmp.zip file on the targeted WordPress server, which
eventually drops a wp-xmlrpc.php backdoor file to the root
directory of the vulnerable site.

MalCare discovered this vulnerability on Wednesday that affects
below-listed versions of the plugins and reported it to the
developers on the same day, who then quickly addressed the issue
and released patched versions of both within just 7 hours.

Ultimate Addons for Elementor <= 1.20.0
Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder <= 1.24.0

The authentication bypass vulnerability has been patched with
the release of “Ultimate Addons for Elementor version
1.20.1 ^[3]” and “Ultimate Addons
for Beaver Builder version
1.24.1 ^[4],” which affected
websites are highly recommended to install as soon as possible.

References

^{^}
MalCare
(www.malcare.com)
^{^}
explained
(www.webarxsecurity.com)
^{^}
version 1.20.1
(uaelementor.com)
^{^}
version 1.24.1
(www.ultimatebeaver.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.

Flaw in Elementor and Beaver Addons Let Anyone Hack WordPress Sites

References

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