FeedBurner FeedSmith <= 2.2 - Cross-Site Request Forgery
Strategic Overview
- Status
- Patched in 2.3
- Affected Plugin
- feedburner-feedsmith
- Affected Version
<= 2.2- CVSS
- 8.8High
- Weakness type
- CWE-352 · Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
- CVE
CVE-2007-5229
At a glance
CVE-2007-5229 is a high-severity Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the feedburner-feedsmith WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 2.2. 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 2.3; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed October 2007, reported by David Kierznowski.
Vulnerability Overview
Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the FeedBurner FeedSmith 2.2 plugin for WordPress allows remote attackers to change settings and hijack blog feeds via a request to wp-admin/options-general.php that submits parameter values to FeedBurner_FeedSmith_Plugin.php, as demonstrated by the (1) feedburner_url and (2) feedburner_comments_url parameters.
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 feedburner-feedsmith <= 2.2 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 feedburner-feedsmith the fix is 2.3: builds <= 2.2 are affected, anything from 2.3 onward is not.
Remediation
Update to version 2.3, or a newer patched version
How does WordSec protect against this?
The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to feedburner-feedsmith: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: feedburner-feedsmith 2.3 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.
- Firewall
- Alerts
External References
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