Greg's High Performance SEO <= 1.6.1 - Reflected Cross-Site Scripting
Strategic Overview
- Status
- Patched in 1.6.2
- Affected Plugin
- Greg's High Performance SEO
- Affected Version
< 1.6.2- CVSS
- 6.1Medium
- Weakness type
- CWE-79 · Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
- CVE
CVE-2015-9319
At a glance
CVE-2015-9319 is a medium-severity Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting') vulnerability in the Greg's High Performance SEO WordPress plugin, affecting versions < 1.6.2. It carries a CVSS score of 6.1 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity). Exploitation requires no authentication. The issue is fixed in version 1.6.2; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed January 2015, reported by Kacper Szurek.
Vulnerability Overview
The gregs-high-performance-seo plugin before 1.6.2 for WordPress has XSS in the context of an old browser via 'submenu' parameter.
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.
CWE-79: Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
Greg's High Performance SEO < 1.6.2 carries this weakness at submenu, and reaching it takes a caller who can reach the endpoint. 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 Greg's High Performance SEO the fix is 1.6.2: builds < 1.6.2 are affected, anything from 1.6.2 onward is not.
Remediation
Update to version 1.6.2, or a newer patched version
How does WordSec protect against this?
The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to Greg's High Performance SEO: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Greg's High Performance SEO 1.6.2 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.
- Firewall
- Alerts
External References
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