Strategic Overview
- Status
- Patched in 2.5.0
- Affected Plugin
- Twitter Cards Meta – Best Twitter Card Plugin for WordPress
- Affected Version
<= 2.4.5- CVSS
- 8.8High
- Weakness type
- CWE-352 · Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
- CVE
CVE-2017-18504
At a glance
CVE-2017-18504 is a high-severity Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the Twitter Cards Meta WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 2.4.5. 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 2.5.0; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed April 2017.
Vulnerability Overview
The Twitter Cards Meta plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery in versions up to, and including, 2.4.5. This is due to missing or incorrect nonce validation. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to gain administrative privileges and execute otherwise restricted actions via a forged request granted they can trick a site administrator into performing an action such as clicking on a link.
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 Twitter Cards Meta <= 2.4.5 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 Twitter Cards Meta the fix is 2.5.0: builds <= 2.4.5 are affected, anything from 2.5.0 onward is not.
Remediation
Update to version 2.5.0, or a newer patched version
How does WordSec protect against this?
The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to Twitter Cards Meta: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Twitter Cards Meta 2.5.0 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.
- Firewall
- Alerts
External References
Related records
Other vulnerabilities in Twitter Cards Meta – Best Twitter Card Plugin for WordPress
Vulnerability data © Defiant, Inc., provided under the Wordfence Intelligence T&C