CVE-2018-5669

Read and Understood < 2.2 - Cross-Site Request Forgery

2018-11-13 00:00

Strategic Overview

Status: Patched in 2.2
Affected Plugin: Read and Understood
Affected Version: < 2.2
CVSS: 8.8High
Weakness type: CWE-352 · Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
CVE: CVE-2018-5669

View all Read and Understood vulnerabilities

At a glance

CVE-2018-5669 is a high-severity Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the Read and Understood WordPress plugin, affecting versions < 2.2. It carries a CVSS score of 8.8 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity; high confidentiality, integrity, availability impact). Exploitation requires no authentication. The issue is fixed in version 2.2; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed November 2018, reported by d4wner.

Vulnerability Overview

An issue was discovered in the read-and-understood plugin 2.1 for WordPress. CSRF exists via wp-admin/options-general.php.

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. A successful exploit has high impact on confidentiality, integrity, availability — full site compromise territory.

CWE-352: Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)

Reaching this weakness in Read and Understood < 2.2 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 Read and Understood the fix is 2.2: builds < 2.2 are affected, anything from 2.2 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 2.2, or a newer patched version

How does WordSec protect against this?

The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to Read and Understood: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Read and Understood 2.2 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

Firewall
Alerts

External References

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2018-5669 https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/2e61942e-15ea-468c-b71a-50396d5b2730 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2018-5669

Related records

CVSS Vector

8.8

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Base

Attack VectorNetwork
Attack ComplexityLow
Privileges RequiredNone
User InteractionRequired
ScopeUnchanged
ConfidentialityHigh
IntegrityHigh
AvailabilityHigh

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