CMP – Coming Soon & Maintenance Plugin by NiteoThemes <= 4.1.16 - Missing Authorization to Authenticated (Administrator+) Arbitrary File Upload and Remote Code Execution

The CMP – Coming Soon & Maintenance Plugin by NiteoThemes plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to arbitrary file upload and remote code execution in all versions up to, and including, 4.1.16 via the `cmp_theme_update_install` AJAX action. This is due to the function only checking for the `publish_pages` capability (available to Editors and above) instead of `manage_options` (Administrators only), combined with a lack of proper validation on the user-supplied file URL and no verification of the downloaded file's content before extraction. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Administrator-level access and above, to force the server to download and extract a malicious ZIP file from a remote attacker-controlled URL into a web-accessible directory (`wp-content/plugins/cmp-premium-themes/`), resulting in remote code execution. Due to the lack of a nonce for Editors, they are unable to exploit this vulnerability.

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: CMP 4.1.17 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

• Firewall
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• Alerts