Backup Migration <= 2.1.5.1 - Authenticated (Administrator+) OS Command Injection via 'file' Parameter

The Backup Migration plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to OS Command Injection in all versions up to, and including, 2.1.5.1 due to insufficient sanitization of the `file` POST parameter on the `restoreBackup()` AJAX handler. The handler applies `esc_attr()` — an HTML-context sanitizer that does not strip shell metacharacters — and concatenates the result, unquoted, into a `php-cli -f … bmi_restore <file> <remote>` command passed to `exec()`. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Administrator-level access (or any user granted the plugin's `do_backups` capability) and above, to execute arbitrary OS commands as the web-server user, bypassing WordPress hardening constants such as `DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT` and `DISALLOW_FILE_MODS` that would otherwise prevent code execution from the admin UI. This is an incomplete fix of CVE-2023-7002, which patched the same pattern only in the `$_POST['url']` path of `handleQuickMigration()`; the equivalent mitigations (`rawurlencode()` + explicit shell-metachar replacement + double-quoting in `exec()`) were never applied to `$backupName`.

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: Backup Migration 2.1.5.2 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

• Firewall
• Scanner
• Alerts