CVE-2019-9978

Social Warfare <= 3.5.2 - Unauthenticated Arbitrary Settings Update

2019-03-21 00:00
Andrew Wilder

Strategic Overview

Status
Patched in 3.5.3
Affected Plugin
Social Sharing Plugin – Social Warfare
Affected Version
< 3.5.3
CVSS
7.2High
Weakness type
CWE-79 · Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
CVE
CVE-2019-9978
View all Social Sharing Plugin – Social Warfare vulnerabilities

At a glance

CVE-2019-9978 is a high-severity Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting') vulnerability in the Social Sharing Plugin WordPress plugin, affecting versions < 3.5.3. It carries a CVSS score of 7.2 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity). Exploitation requires no authentication. The issue is fixed in version 3.5.3; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed March 2019, reported by Andrew Wilder.

Vulnerability Overview

The Social Warfare plugin before 3.5.3 for WordPress has stored XSS via the wp-admin/admin-post.php?swp_debug=load_options swp_url parameter, as exploited in the wild in March 2019. This affects Social Warfare and Social Warfare Pro.

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, and no interaction from a victim user.

CWE-79: Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')

Reaching this weakness in Social Sharing Plugin < 3.5.3 takes no account at all. 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 Social Sharing Plugin the fix is 3.5.3: builds < 3.5.3 are affected, anything from 3.5.3 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 3.5.3, or a newer patched version

How does WordSec protect against this?

Requests carrying this pattern arrive without a session, so nothing upstream of the firewall gets a chance to reject them: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Social Sharing Plugin 3.5.3 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

  • Firewall
  • Login Security
  • Alerts

External References

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2019-9978https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/2fca8dba-9fe7-4ce1-8903-589e42e5604dhttps://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-9978

Related records

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