CVE-2024-0437

Password Protected – Ultimate Plugin to Password Protect Your WordPress Content with Ease <= 2.6.6 - Missing Authorization to Sensitive Information Exposure

2024-05-14 00:00
Francesco Carlucci

Strategic Overview

Status
Patched in 2.6.7
Affected Plugin
Password Protected — Lock Entire Site, Pages, Posts, Categories, and Partial Content
Affected Version
<= 2.6.6
CVSS
4.3Medium
Weakness type
CWE-284 · Improper Access Control
CVE
CVE-2024-0437
View all Password Protected — Lock Entire Site, Pages, Posts, Categories, and Partial Content vulnerabilities

At a glance

CVE-2024-0437 is a medium-severity Improper Access Control vulnerability in the Password Protected WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 2.6.6. It carries a CVSS score of 4.3 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity). The root cause is a missing authorization check on a reachable function. The issue is fixed in version 2.6.7; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed May 2024, reported by Francesco Carlucci.

Vulnerability Overview

The Password Protected – Ultimate Plugin to Password Protect Your WordPress Content with Ease plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Sensitive Information Exposure in all versions up to, and including, 2.6.6 via the API. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with subscriber access or higher, to extract post titles and content, thus bypassing the plugin's password protection.

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-284: Improper Access Control

Reaching this weakness in Password Protected <= 2.6.6 takes a caller who can reach the endpoint. Improper access control means the code decides what a caller may do using something other than their actual permissions, so the decision can be wrong without any check appearing to be missing.

Whoever can shape the request decides the answer, so the protected action runs for callers the code never meant to allow. For Password Protected the fix is 2.6.7: builds <= 2.6.6 are affected, anything from 2.6.7 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 2.6.7, or a newer patched version

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. None of that substitutes for the fix: Password Protected 2.6.7 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

  • Login Security
  • Alerts

External References

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2024-0437https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/f3045ebf-70af-4124-9116-42c07f64a3bfhttps://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-0437

Related records

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