CVE-2023-0484

Contact Form 7 Widget For Elementor Page Builder & Gutenberg Blocks <= 1.1.5 - Cross-Site Request Forgery to Arbitrary Plugin Activation

2023-02-28 00:00
István Márton

Strategic Overview

Status
Patched in 1.1.6
Affected Plugin
HT Contact Form – Drag & Drop Form Builder for WordPress
Affected Version
<= 1.1.5
CVSS
4.3Medium
Weakness type
CWE-352 · Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
CVE
CVE-2023-0484
View all HT Contact Form – Drag & Drop Form Builder for WordPress vulnerabilities

At a glance

CVE-2023-0484 is a medium-severity Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the HT Contact Form WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 1.1.5. It carries a CVSS score of 4.3 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity). Exploitation requires no authentication. The issue is fixed in version 1.1.6; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed February 2023, reported by István Márton.

Vulnerability Overview

The Contact Form 7 Widget For Elementor Page Builder & Gutenberg Blocks plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery in versions up to, and including, 1.1.5. This is due to missing or incorrect nonce validation on the 'plugin_activation' function. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to activate arbitrary plugins already installed (but deactivated) on the site via a forged request granted they can trick a site administrator 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.

CWE-352: Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)

HT Contact Form <= 1.1.5 carries this weakness at plugin_activation, and reaching it 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 HT Contact Form the fix is 1.1.6: builds <= 1.1.5 are affected, anything from 1.1.6 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 1.1.6, or a newer patched version

How does WordSec protect against this?

The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to HT Contact Form: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: HT Contact Form 1.1.6 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

  • Firewall
  • Alerts

External References

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-0484https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/dfe6f49a-1dd1-46d9-8e15-a8a766917092https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-0484

Related records

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