Herd Effects <= 5.2.3 - Cross-Site Request Forgery to Effect Deletion
Strategic Overview
- Status
- Patched in 5.2.4
- Affected Plugin
- Social Proof Popups & Real-Time Notifications – Herd Effects
- Affected Version
<= 5.2.3- CVSS
- 4.3Medium
- Weakness type
- CWE-352 · Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
- CVE
CVE-2023-4318
At a glance
CVE-2023-4318 is a medium-severity Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the Social Proof Popups & Real-Time Notifications WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 5.2.3. It carries a CVSS score of 4.3 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity). Exploitation requires no authentication. The issue is fixed in version 5.2.4; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed August 2023, reported by Erwan LR.
Vulnerability Overview
The Herd Effects for WordPress is vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery in versions up to, and including, 5.2.3. This is due to missing or incorrect nonce validation when deleting effects. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to delete effects 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.
CWE-352: Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
Reaching this weakness in Social Proof Popups & Real-Time Notifications <= 5.2.3 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 Social Proof Popups & Real-Time Notifications the fix is 5.2.4: builds <= 5.2.3 are affected, anything from 5.2.4 onward is not.
Remediation
Update to version 5.2.4, or a newer patched version
How does WordSec protect against this?
The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to Social Proof Popups & Real-Time Notifications: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Social Proof Popups & Real-Time Notifications 5.2.4 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.
- Firewall
- Alerts
External References
Related records
Same weakness class
Other vulnerabilities in Social Proof Popups & Real-Time Notifications – Herd Effects
Vulnerability data © Defiant, Inc., provided under the Wordfence Intelligence T&C