Birthdays Widget <= 1.7.18 - Authenticated (Admin+) Stored Cross-Site Scripting
Strategic Overview
- Status
- Unpatched
- Affected Plugin
- Birthdays Widget
- Affected Version
<= 1.7.18- CVSS
- 5.5Medium
- Weakness type
- CWE-79 · Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
- CVE
CVE-2022-1643
At a glance
CVE-2022-1643 is a medium-severity Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting') vulnerability in the Birthdays Widget WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 1.7.18. It carries a CVSS score of 5.5 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity). Exploitation requires an authenticated account at Admin level or above. No fixed release has been reported yet; treat installations running this software as exposed. Disclosed May 2022, reported by Rutuja Chaudhari.
Vulnerability Overview
The Birthdays Widget WordPress plugin through 1.7.18 does not sanitise and escape some of its fields, which could allow high privilege users such as admin to perform Stored Cross-Site Scripting attacks when the unfiltered_html capability is disallowed
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 interaction from a victim user.
CWE-79: Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
Reaching this weakness in Birthdays Widget <= 1.7.18 takes an account at Admin level or above. 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. No fixed build of this plugin is recorded for Birthdays Widget yet, so installs running <= 1.7.18 stay exposed until the vendor ships one.
Remediation
No known patch available. Please review the vulnerability's details in depth and employ mitigations based on your organization's risk tolerance. It may be best to uninstall the affected software and find a replacement.
How does WordSec protect against this?
An attacker needs Admin 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. No patched version is recorded yet, which is the case where a filtering layer matters most, because there is nothing to update to.
- Firewall
- Alerts
External References
Vulnerability data © Defiant, Inc., provided under the Wordfence Intelligence T&C