Popular Brand Icons - Simple Icons <= 2.7.7 - Authenticated Cross-Site Scripting
Strategic Overview
- Status
- Patched in 2.7.8
- Affected Plugin
- Popular Brand Icons – Simple Icons
- Affected Version
< 2.7.8- CVSS
- 5.4Medium
- Weakness type
- CWE-79 · Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
- CVE
CVE-2021-24503
At a glance
CVE-2021-24503 is a medium-severity Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting') vulnerability in the Popular Brand Icons WordPress plugin, affecting versions < 2.7.8. It carries a CVSS score of 5.4 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity). Exploitation requires an authenticated account. The issue is fixed in version 2.7.8; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed July 2021, reported by apple502j.
Vulnerability Overview
The Popular Brand Icons – Simple Icons WordPress plugin before 2.7.8 does not sanitise or validate some of its shortcode parameters, such as "color", "size" or "class", allowing users with a role as low as Contributor to set Cross-Site payload in them. A post made by a contributor would still have to be approved by an admin to have the XSS triggered in the frontend, however, higher privilege users, such as editor could exploit this without the need of approval, and even when the blog disallows the unfiltered_html capability.
Technical Analysis
The vector marks this flaw as remotely reachable over the network, with low attack complexity — no special timing or configuration is needed.
CWE-79: Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
Popular Brand Icons < 2.7.8 carries this weakness at color, and reaching it takes any authenticated account. 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 Popular Brand Icons the fix is 2.7.8: builds < 2.7.8 are affected, anything from 2.7.8 onward is not.
Remediation
Update to version 2.7.8, or a newer patched version
How does WordSec protect against this?
The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to Popular Brand Icons: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Popular Brand Icons 2.7.8 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.
- Firewall
- Alerts
External References
Related records
Other vulnerabilities in Popular Brand Icons – Simple Icons
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