Cost Calculator <= 1.5 - Contributor+ Stored Cross-Site Scripting
Strategic Overview
- Status
- Patched in 1.6
- Affected Plugin
- Cost Calculator
- Affected Version
<= 1.5- CVSS
- 6.4Medium
- Weakness type
- CWE-79 · Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
- CVE
CVE-2021-24821
At a glance
CVE-2021-24821 is a medium-severity Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting') vulnerability in the Cost Calculator WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 1.5. It carries a CVSS score of 6.4 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity). The issue is fixed in version 1.6; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed February 2022, reported by apple502j.
Vulnerability Overview
The Cost Calculator WordPress plugin before 1.6 allows users with a role as low as Contributor to perform Stored Cross-Site Scripting attacks via the Description fields of a Cost Calculator > Price Settings (which gets injected on the edit page as well as any page that embeds the calculator using the shortcode), as well as the Text Preview field of a Project (injected on the edit project page)
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.
CWE-79: Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
Reaching this weakness in Cost Calculator <= 1.5 takes a caller who can reach the endpoint. Cross-site scripting happens when input from a request is written into a page without being escaped for the context it lands in, so the browser parses attacker-supplied text as markup or script.
Injected script runs with the privileges of whoever views the affected page, which is how these flaws turn into administrator session theft, silent account creation or persistent backdoors in page content. For Cost Calculator the fix is 1.6: builds <= 1.5 are affected, anything from 1.6 onward is not.
Remediation
Update to version 1.6, or a newer patched version
How does WordSec protect against this?
The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to Cost Calculator: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Cost Calculator 1.6 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.
- Firewall
- Alerts
External References
Related records
Vulnerability data © Defiant, Inc., provided under the Wordfence Intelligence T&C