Home » ajax » Page 2

Tag: ajax

OptinMonster < 1.1.4.6 allows execution of arbitrary WordPress shortcodes

by James Golovich

OptinMonster is a WordPress plugin/service to collect leads from customers visiting a website. The plugin is free to download from wordpress.org and it claims there are 20,000+ active installs. The service does require a membership, so presumably they have contacted all of their customers to tell them to upgrade.

I discovered an issue that allows any non-authenticated user to execute arbitrary WordPress shortcodes. Generally this type of access is only allowed by users with the ability to edit content on a site. Most of the default shortcodes aren’t very exciting and don’t provide much leverage for an attacker, but many third-party plugins expect that anyone who is able to execute shortcodes has sufficient permission that they don’t need to provide any further security.

Read more

Formidable Forms < 2.0.22 Security Vulnerability

by James Golovich

Formidable Forms is a visual form builder WordPress plugin from Strategy 11. The free version has 200,000+ active installs which makes it one of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress.

I noticed some potential security vulnerabilities in some of the more obscure AJAX actions they make available. Most of the actions are protected by a helpful function FrmAppHelper::permission_check() which checks if a user has the WordPress permission for the action as well as a valid nonce for the action. Kudos on implementing a system that makes it easy to be secure without duplicating code all over the place!

All of the actions uncovered require at least a valid WordPress account, but any account will work. If you are using this plugin, please update immediately.

Read more

Backup Guard < 1.0.3 Logged in users can upload arbitrary files

by James Golovich

Backup Guard is one of many WordPress plugins to designed to backup your site. The free version on wordpress.org claims to have 20,000+ active installs, there is no indication of how many installs the non-free version has. After disclosing this information the developer sent me a copy of the paid version, but I have not had time to investigate that code.

As of today, the included ChangeLog still does not have any release notes related to this version and I have not seen any announcements of any security issues.

I noticed several issues related to their handling of AJAX requests. One of them allowed a non-authenticated user to trigger a manual backup. Though by default it uses .htaccess to keep anyone from accessing the backup files directly. With the paid version it might have been possible to pass in a remote location to backup the file to, but I did not have the code available when I did my initial analysis to determine if that was possible.

The other AJAX commands required a valid WordPress account (not just admin), none of the commands did any further authorization so a normal user could do any of the actions. There are lots of actions to choose from, the most interesting to me was ‘backup_guard_importBackup’.

Read more