CVE-2019-15238

CformsII <= 15.0.1 - Unauthenticated HTML Injection & Cross-Site Request Forgery

2019-08-12 00:00

Strategic Overview

Status: Patched in 15.0.2
Affected Plugin: cformsII
Affected Version: < 15.0.2
CVSS: 8.8High
Weakness type: CWE-352 · Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
CVE: CVE-2019-15238

At a glance

CVE-2019-15238 is a high-severity Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the cformsII WordPress plugin, affecting versions < 15.0.2. It carries a CVSS score of 8.8 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity; high confidentiality, integrity, availability impact). Exploitation requires no authentication. The issue is fixed in version 15.0.2; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed August 2019, reported by Jerome Bruandet.

Vulnerability Overview

The cforms2 plugin before 15.0.2 for WordPress has CSRF related to the IP address field.

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. A successful exploit has high impact on confidentiality, integrity, availability — full site compromise territory.

CWE-352: Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)

Reaching this weakness in cformsII < 15.0.2 takes no account at all. Cross-site request forgery abuses the fact that browsers attach a victim's cookies to any request, so a state-changing action that only checks who you are, not whether you meant to act, can be triggered from another site.

An attacker who gets a logged-in user to load a crafted page can perform that action as them, with the impact scaling to whatever the victim's role is allowed to do. For cformsII the fix is 15.0.2: builds < 15.0.2 are affected, anything from 15.0.2 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 15.0.2, 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: cformsII 15.0.2 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-2019-15238 https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/acff00f2-586d-474c-8dec-f27c488e9045 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-15238

Related records

Same weakness class

Other vulnerabilities in cformsII

CVSS Vector

8.8

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Base

Attack VectorNetwork
Attack ComplexityLow
Privileges RequiredNone
User InteractionRequired
ScopeUnchanged
ConfidentialityHigh
IntegrityHigh
AvailabilityHigh

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