CVE-2021-42361

Contact Form Email <= 1.3.24 - Authenticated (Admin+) Stored Cross-Site Scripting

2021-11-11 14:20
Mohammed Aadhil Ashfaq

Strategic Overview

Status
Patched in 1.3.25
Affected Plugin
Contact Form Email
Affected Version
<= 1.3.24
CVSS
4.8Medium
Weakness type
CWE-79 · Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
CVE
CVE-2021-42361
View all Contact Form Email vulnerabilities

At a glance

CVE-2021-42361 is a medium-severity Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting') vulnerability in the Contact Form Email WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 1.3.24. It carries a CVSS score of 4.8 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity). Exploitation requires an authenticated account at Admin level or above. The issue is fixed in version 1.3.25; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed November 2021, reported by Mohammed Aadhil Ashfaq.

Vulnerability Overview

The Contact Form Email WordPress plugin is vulnerable to Stored Cross-Site Scripting due to insufficient input validation and escaping via the name parameter found in the ~/trunk/cp-admin-int-list.inc.php file which allowed attackers with administrative user access to inject arbitrary web scripts, in versions up to and including 1.3.24. This affects multi-site installations where unfiltered_html is disabled for administrators, and sites where unfiltered_html is disabled. CVE-2021-47926 is a duplicate of this.

Technical Analysis

The vector marks this flaw as remotely reachable over the network, with low attack complexity — no special timing or configuration is needed.

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

Reaching this weakness in Contact Form Email <= 1.3.24 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. For Contact Form Email the fix is 1.3.25: builds <= 1.3.24 are affected, anything from 1.3.25 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 1.3.25, or a newer patched version

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. None of that substitutes for the fix: Contact Form Email 1.3.25 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

  • Firewall
  • Alerts

External References

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2021-42361https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/96b58c2c-f292-4a48-bd1e-c33cf464c1cehttps://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-42361

Related records

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