Strategic Overview
- Status
- Unpatched
- Affected Plugin
- twitter-liveblog
- Affected Version
<= 1.1.2- CVSS
- 6.3Medium
- Weakness type
- CWE-352 · Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
- CVE
CVE-2014-9398
At a glance
CVE-2014-9398 is a medium-severity Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the twitter-liveblog WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 1.1.2. It carries a CVSS score of 6.3 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity). Exploitation requires no authentication. No fixed release has been reported yet; treat installations running this software as exposed. Disclosed December 2014, reported by Manideep K.
Vulnerability Overview
Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the Twitter LiveBlog plugin 1.1.2 and earlier for WordPress allows remote attackers to hijack the authentication of administrators for requests that conduct cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks via the mashtlb_twitter_username parameter in the twitter-liveblog.php page to 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.
CWE-352: Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
Reaching this weakness in twitter-liveblog <= 1.1.2 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. No fixed build of this plugin is recorded for twitter-liveblog yet, so installs running <= 1.1.2 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?
The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to twitter-liveblog: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. No patched version is recorded yet, which is the case where a filtering layer matters most, because there is nothing to update to.
- Firewall
- Alerts
External References
Vulnerability data © Defiant, Inc., provided under the Wordfence Intelligence T&C