Material Design for Contact Form 7 <= 2.6.4 - Missing Authorization to Arbitrary Settings Update
Strategic Overview
- Status
- Unpatched
- Affected Plugin
- Material Design for Contact Form 7
- Affected Version
<= 2.6.4- CVSS
- 6.5Medium
- Weakness type
- CWE-862 · Missing Authorization
- CVE
CVE-2022-0404
At a glance
CVE-2022-0404 is a medium-severity Missing Authorization vulnerability in the Material Design for Contact Form 7 WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 2.6.4. It carries a CVSS score of 6.5 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity; high availability impact). The root cause is a missing authorization check on a reachable function. No fixed release has been reported yet; treat installations running this software as exposed. Disclosed March 2022, reported by Krzysztof Zając.
Vulnerability Overview
The Material Design for Contact Form 7 WordPress plugin through 2.6.4 does not check authorization or that the option mentioned in the notice param belongs to the plugin when processing requests to the cf7md_dismiss_notice action, allowing any logged in user (with roles as low as Subscriber) to set arbitrary options to true, potentially leading to Denial of Service by breaking the site.
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 interaction from a victim user. A successful exploit has high impact on availability.
CWE-862: Missing Authorization
Reaching this weakness in Material Design for Contact Form 7 <= 2.6.4 takes a caller who can reach the endpoint. A missing authorization check means a function is reachable by anyone who can reach the endpoint, because the code never asks whether the caller is allowed to perform the action.
Any user who can reach the endpoint gets to run an action reserved for higher-privileged roles, from reading protected data to changing settings or content. No fixed build of this plugin is recorded for Material Design for Contact Form 7 yet, so installs running <= 2.6.4 stay exposed until the vendor ships one.
Remediation
No known patch available. Please review the vulnerability's details in depth and employ mitigations based on your organization's risk tolerance. It may be best to uninstall the affected software and find a replacement.
How does WordSec protect against this?
Because it turns on account access, WordSec's login security is the relevant layer: role-based two-factor, captcha and brute-force limits raise the cost of getting the account this needs. No patched version is recorded yet, which is the case where a filtering layer matters most, because there is nothing to update to.
- Login Security
- Alerts
External References
Vulnerability data © Defiant, Inc., provided under the Wordfence Intelligence T&C