CVE-2019-17515

Spam protection, AntiSpam, FireWall by CleanTalk <= 5.127.3 - Reflected Cross-Site Scripting

2019-11-12 00:00
Anonymous

Strategic Overview

Status
Patched in 5.127.4
Affected Plugin
Spam protection, Honeypot, Anti-Spam by CleanTalk
Affected Version
<= 5.127.3
CVSS
6.1Medium
Weakness type
CWE-79 · Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
CVE
CVE-2019-17515
View all Spam protection, Honeypot, Anti-Spam by CleanTalk vulnerabilities

At a glance

CVE-2019-17515 is a medium-severity Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting') vulnerability in the Spam protection, Honeypot, Anti-Spam by CleanTalk WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 5.127.3. It carries a CVSS score of 6.1 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity). Exploitation requires no authentication. The issue is fixed in version 5.127.4; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed November 2019.

Vulnerability Overview

The CleanTalk cleantalk-spam-protect plugin before 5.127.4 for WordPress is affected by: Cross Site Scripting (XSS). The impact is: Allows an attacker to execute arbitrary HTML and JavaScript code via the from or till parameter. The component is: inc/cleantalk-users.php and inc/cleantalk-comments.php. The attack vector is: When the Administrator is logged in, a reflected XSS may execute upon a click on a malicious URL.

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.

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

Reaching this weakness in Spam protection, Honeypot, Anti-Spam by CleanTalk <= 5.127.3 takes a caller who can reach the endpoint. 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 Spam protection, Honeypot, Anti-Spam by CleanTalk the fix is 5.127.4: builds <= 5.127.3 are affected, anything from 5.127.4 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 5.127.4, or a newer patched version

How does WordSec protect against this?

The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to Spam protection, Honeypot, Anti-Spam by CleanTalk: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Spam protection, Honeypot, Anti-Spam by CleanTalk 5.127.4 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

  • Firewall
  • Alerts

External References

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2019-17515https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/f3855918-960e-487d-9d5f-6dbeba45523ehttps://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-17515

Related records

Vulnerability data © Defiant, Inc., provided under the Wordfence Intelligence T&C