CVE-2024-9658

School Management System for Wordpress <= 93.0.0 - Authenticated (Student+) Account Takeover and Privilege Escalation

2025-03-06 00:00
Tonn

Strategic Overview

Status
Unpatched
Affected Version
<= 93.0.0
CVSS
8.8High
Weakness type
CWE-288 · Authentication Bypass Using an Alternate Path or Channel
CVE
CVE-2024-9658
View all School Management System for Wordpress vulnerabilities

At a glance

CVE-2024-9658 is a high-severity Authentication Bypass Using an Alternate Path or Channel vulnerability in the School Management System for Wordpress WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 93.0.0. It carries a CVSS score of 8.8 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity; high confidentiality, integrity, availability impact). Exploitation requires an authenticated account at Student level or above. No fixed release has been reported yet; treat installations running this software as exposed. Disclosed March 2025, reported by Tonn.

Vulnerability Overview

The School Management System for Wordpress plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to privilege escalation via account takeover in all versions up to, and including, 93.0.0. This is due to the plugin not properly validating a user's identity prior to updating their details like email and password through the mj_smgt_update_user() and mj_smgt_add_admission() functions, along with a local file inclusion vulnerability. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with student-level access and above, to change arbitrary user's email addresses and passwords, including administrators, and leverage that to gain access to their account. This was escalated four months ago after no response to our initial outreach, yet it still vulnerable.

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-288: Authentication Bypass Using an Alternate Path or Channel

School Management System for Wordpress <= 93.0.0 carries this weakness at mj_smgt_update_user(), and reaching it takes an account at Student level or above. Authentication bypass through an alternate path means the application has a second route to a protected action that skips the checks the primary route performs.

The protection on the main path becomes irrelevant, because the attacker simply uses the route that never asks. No fixed build of this plugin is recorded for School Management System for Wordpress yet, so installs running <= 93.0.0 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?

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. No patched version is recorded yet, which is the case where a filtering layer matters most, because there is nothing to update to.

  • Login Security
  • Alerts

External References

Related records

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