WordPress Core < 6.4.3 - Authenticated(Administrator+) PHP File Upload

In all current versions of WordPress Core before 6.4.3, plugins uploaded via the admin area are not verified as being ZIP files. This allows for PHP files to be uploaded. Once a PHP file is uploaded, the plugin extraction fails, but the PHP file remains in a predictable wp-content/uploads location, allowing for an attacker to then execute the file. This represents a security risk in limited scenarios where an attacker (who does have the required capabilities for plugin uploads) cannot simply place arbitrary PHP code into a valid plugin ZIP file and upload that plugin, because a machine's wp-content/plugins directory permissions were set up to block all new plugins. Please note that this requires administrator or super administrator permissions(on multisite installations) and only impacts heavily locked-down installations where even these users cannot install new plugins. CVE-2024-31210 may be a duplicate of this issue.

An attacker needs Administrator access first, so the firewall sees the attempt as traffic from a logged-in account: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. Classes like this one can leave something behind, so the staged malware scanner is the second half: it looks for dropped files and modified code rather than for the request that created them. None of that substitutes for the fix: updating to 4.1.40 is the step that ends it.

• Firewall
• Scanner
• Alerts