Hummingbird – Speed Optimization, Caching, Minify, Compress & CDN <= 3.21.0 - Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution via Cookie Name in Page Cache Debug Log

The Hummingbird – Speed Optimization, Caching, Minify, Compress & CDN plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Remote Code Execution in all versions up to, and including, 3.21.0 via the log_msg() function in core/modules/class-page-cache.php. The page-cache debug log is written to wp-content/wphb-logs/page-caching-log.php, a directly web-accessible PHP file that is supposed to be protected by a leading '<?php die(); ?>' header. That header is guarded by class_exists( 'Filesystem' ), which can never match because class_exists() resolves string arguments in the global namespace while the class is Hummingbird\Core\Filesystem; when the log is created during a front-end request the header is therefore omitted entirely. get_cookies() then writes the raw name of any cookie matching the wphb_cache_ prefix into that file without sanitization. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to write arbitrary PHP into the log file with a single anonymous request and execute it by requesting the file directly, resulting in full remote code execution. Exploitation requires the site administrator to have enabled Page Caching with the Debug Log option (non-default), and the log file to be created during a front-end request — a state reached by the plugin's own 'Clear logs' action, any cache flush, or unattended via the plugin's daily log-rotation cron, which can strip the protective header from an existing log file.

Requests carrying this pattern arrive without a session, so nothing upstream of the firewall gets a chance to reject them: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. Classes like this one can leave something behind, so the staged malware scanner is the second half: it looks for dropped files and modified code rather than for the request that created them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Hummingbird Performance 3.21.1 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

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