CVE-2024-7094

JS Help Desk – The Ultimate Help Desk & Support Plugin <= 2.8.6 - Unauthenticated PHP Code Injection to Remote Code Execution

2024-08-12 14:17
Connor Billings

Strategic Overview

Status
Patched in 2.8.7
Affected Plugin
JS Help Desk – AI-Powered Support & Ticketing System
Affected Version
<= 2.8.6
CVSS
9.8Critical
Weakness type
CWE-94 · Improper Control of Generation of Code ('Code Injection')
CVE
CVE-2024-7094
View all JS Help Desk – AI-Powered Support & Ticketing System vulnerabilities

At a glance

CVE-2024-7094 is a critical-severity Improper Control of Generation of Code ('Code Injection') vulnerability in the JS Help Desk WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 2.8.6. It carries a CVSS score of 9.8 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity; high confidentiality, integrity, availability impact). Exploitation requires no authentication. The issue is fixed in version 2.8.7; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed August 2024, reported by Connor Billings.

Vulnerability Overview

The JS Help Desk – The Ultimate Help Desk & Support Plugin plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to PHP Code Injection leading to Remote Code Execution in all versions up to, and including, 2.8.6 via the 'storeTheme' function. This is due to a lack of sanitization on user-supplied values, which replace values in the style.php file, along with missing capability checks. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to execute code on the server. This issue was partially patched in 2.8.6 when the code injection issue was resolved, and fully patched in 2.8.7 when the missing authorization and cross-site request forgery protection was added. CVE-2024-43274 is likely a duplicate of this issue.

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, and no interaction from a victim user. A successful exploit has high impact on confidentiality, integrity, availability — full site compromise territory.

CWE-94: Improper Control of Generation of Code ('Code Injection')

JS Help Desk <= 2.8.6 carries this weakness at storeTheme, and reaching it takes no account at all. Code injection means input from a request reaches a language construct that evaluates code, so the attacker's text is executed rather than treated as data.

The injected code runs with the web server's privileges, giving the attacker the same access to the database and filesystem as WordPress itself. For JS Help Desk the fix is 2.8.7: builds <= 2.8.6 are affected, anything from 2.8.7 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 2.8.7, or a newer patched version

How does WordSec protect against this?

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: JS Help Desk 2.8.7 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

  • Firewall
  • Scanner
  • Login Security

External References

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2024-7094https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/31513f9e-6185-425b-9e7e-36f21f72d0a2https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-7094

Related records

Vulnerability data © Defiant, Inc., provided under the Wordfence Intelligence T&C