CVE-2024-1487

Photos and Files Contest Gallery – Contact Form, Upload Form, Social Share and Voting Competition Plugin for WordPress <= 21.3.0 - Authenticated (Author+) Stored Cross-Site Scripting

2024-02-14 00:00

Strategic Overview

Status: Patched in 21.3.1
Affected Plugin: Contest Gallery – Upload & Vote Photos, Media, Sell with PayPal & Stripe
Affected Version: <= 21.3.0
CVSS: 6.4Medium
Weakness type: CWE-79 · Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
CVE: CVE-2024-1487

View all Contest Gallery – Upload & Vote Photos, Media, Sell with PayPal & Stripe vulnerabilities

At a glance

CVE-2024-1487 is a medium-severity Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting') vulnerability in the Contest Gallery WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 21.3.0. It carries a CVSS score of 6.4 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity). Exploitation requires an authenticated account at Author level or above. The issue is fixed in version 21.3.1; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed February 2024, reported by Giulio.

Vulnerability Overview

The Photos and Files Contest Gallery – Contact Form, Upload Form, Social Share and Voting Competition Plugin for WordPress plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Stored Cross-Site Scripting in all versions up to, and including, 21.3.0 due to insufficient input sanitization and output escaping on content descriptions. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with author-level access and above, to inject arbitrary web scripts in pages that will execute whenever a user accesses an injected page.

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 Contest Gallery <= 21.3.0 takes an account at Author 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 Contest Gallery the fix is 21.3.1: builds <= 21.3.0 are affected, anything from 21.3.1 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 21.3.1, or a newer patched version

How does WordSec protect against this?

An attacker needs Author 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: Contest Gallery 21.3.1 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

Firewall
Alerts

External References

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2024-1487 https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/7ef37e72-f98f-4df6-8adb-514690350a82 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-1487

Related records

Same weakness class

Other vulnerabilities in Contest Gallery – Upload & Vote Photos, Media, Sell with PayPal & Stripe

CVSS Vector

6.4

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

Base

Attack VectorNetwork
Attack ComplexityLow
Privileges RequiredLow
User InteractionNone
ScopeChanged
ConfidentialityLow
IntegrityLow
AvailabilityNone

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