CVE-2021-25078

Affiliates Manager <= 2.8.9 - Unauthenticated Stored Cross-Site Scripting

2021-12-24 00:00
Krzysztof Zając

Strategic Overview

Status
Patched in 2.9.0
Affected Plugin
Affiliates Manager
Affected Version
<= 2.8.9
CVSS
7.2High
Weakness type
CWE-79 · Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
CVE
CVE-2021-25078
View all Affiliates Manager vulnerabilities

At a glance

CVE-2021-25078 is a high-severity Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting') vulnerability in the Affiliates Manager WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 2.8.9. It carries a CVSS score of 7.2 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity). Exploitation requires no authentication. The issue is fixed in version 2.9.0; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed December 2021, reported by Krzysztof Zając.

Vulnerability Overview

The Affiliates Manager WordPress plugin before 2.9.0 does not validate, sanitise and escape the IP address of requests logged by the click tracking feature, allowing unauthenticated attackers to perform Cross-Site Scripting attacks against admin viewing the tracked requests.

Technical Analysis

The vector marks this flaw as remotely reachable over the network, with low attack complexity — no special timing or configuration is needed, and no privileges on the target site, and no interaction from a victim user.

CWE-79: Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')

Reaching this weakness in Affiliates Manager <= 2.8.9 takes no account at all. Cross-site scripting happens when input from a request is written into a page without being escaped for the context it lands in, so the browser parses attacker-supplied text as markup or script.

Injected script runs with the privileges of whoever views the affected page, which is how these flaws turn into administrator session theft, silent account creation or persistent backdoors in page content. For Affiliates Manager the fix is 2.9.0: builds <= 2.8.9 are affected, anything from 2.9.0 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 2.9.0, or a newer patched version

How does WordSec protect against this?

Requests carrying this pattern arrive without a session, so nothing upstream of the firewall gets a chance to reject them: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Affiliates Manager 2.9.0 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

  • Firewall
  • Login Security
  • Alerts

External References

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2021-25078https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/d68e74c2-3732-40ae-b589-3a9159aff93dhttps://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-25078

Related records

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