Job Manager & Career – Manage job board listings, and recruitments <= 1.4.4 - Cross-Site Request Forgery to PHP Object Injection
Strategic Overview
- Status
- Patched in 1.4.5
- Affected Version
<= 1.4.4- CVSS
- 8.8High
- Weakness type
- CWE-352 · Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
- CVE
CVE-2023-51545
At a glance
CVE-2023-51545 is a high-severity Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the Job Manager & Career WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 1.4.4. 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 1.4.5; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed December 2023, reported by Rafie Muhammad.
Vulnerability Overview
The Job Manager & Career – Manage job board listings, and recruitments plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery in all versions up to, and including, 1.4.4. This is due to missing or incorrect nonce validation on the save_plugin_settings() function. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to update the plugins settings and perform deserialization that can be leveraged for RCE 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. A successful exploit has high impact on confidentiality, integrity, availability — full site compromise territory.
CWE-352: Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
Job Manager & Career <= 1.4.4 carries this weakness at save_plugin_settings(), 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 Job Manager & Career the fix is 1.4.5: builds <= 1.4.4 are affected, anything from 1.4.5 onward is not.
Remediation
Update to version 1.4.5, or a newer patched version
How does WordSec protect against this?
The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to Job Manager & Career: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Job Manager & Career 1.4.5 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.
- Firewall
- Alerts
External References
Related records
Other vulnerabilities in Job Manager & Career – Manage job board listings, and recruitments
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