Events Made Easy < 1.5.50 - Cross-Site Request Forgery to Stored Cross-Site Scripting

2015-10-15 00:00
David Sopas

Strategic Overview

Status
Patched in 1.5.50
Affected Plugin
Events Made Easy
Affected Version
< 1.5.50
CVSS
8.8High
Weakness type
CWE-352 · Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
CVE
CVE pending
View all Events Made Easy vulnerabilities

At a glance

This record tracks a high-severity Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the Events Made Easy WordPress plugin, affecting versions < 1.5.50. 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 1.5.50; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed October 2015, reported by David Sopas.

Vulnerability Overview

The Events Made Easy plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery to Stored Cross-Site Scripting in versions before 1.5.50 due to insufficient input sanitization and output escaping and missing nonce validation. This makes it possible for attackers to inject arbitrary web scripts in pages that will execute whenever a user accesses an injected page if they can successfully trick an admin into performing an action such as clicking on a link.

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 Events Made Easy < 1.5.50 takes a caller who can reach the endpoint. 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 Events Made Easy the fix is 1.5.50: builds < 1.5.50 are affected, anything from 1.5.50 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 1.5.50, or a newer patched version

How does WordSec protect against this?

The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to Events Made Easy: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Events Made Easy 1.5.50 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

  • Firewall
  • Alerts

External References

https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/914e17ce-ab09-4e9f-9466-0ed21712cf66

Related records

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