Menu Item Visibility Control <= 0.5 - Authenticated (Admin+) Remote Code Execution
Strategic Overview
- Status
- Unpatched
- Affected Plugin
- Menu Item Visibility Control
- Affected Version
<= 0.5- CVSS
- 7.2High
- Weakness type
- CWE-94 · Improper Control of Generation of Code ('Code Injection')
- CVE
CVE-2021-24942
At a glance
CVE-2021-24942 is a high-severity Improper Control of Generation of Code ('Code Injection') vulnerability in the Menu Item Visibility Control WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 0.5. It carries a CVSS score of 7.2 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity; high confidentiality, integrity, availability impact). Exploitation requires an authenticated account at Admin level or above. No fixed release has been reported yet; treat installations running this software as exposed. Disclosed November 2022, reported by bl4derunner.
Vulnerability Overview
The Menu Item Visibility Control plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Remote Code Execution in versions up to, and including, 0.5 via the 'visibility logic' option. This allows administrator-level attackers to execute code on the server.
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 confidentiality, integrity, availability — full site compromise territory.
CWE-94: Improper Control of Generation of Code ('Code Injection')
Reaching this weakness in Menu Item Visibility Control <= 0.5 takes an account at Admin level or above. 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. No fixed build of this plugin is recorded for Menu Item Visibility Control yet, so installs running <= 0.5 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?
An attacker needs Admin access first, so the firewall sees the attempt as traffic from a logged-in account: 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. No patched version is recorded yet, which is the case where a filtering layer matters most, because there is nothing to update to.
- Firewall
- Scanner
- Alerts
External References
Vulnerability data © Defiant, Inc., provided under the Wordfence Intelligence T&C