CVE-2020-35135

Ultimate Category Excluder <= 1.1 - Cross-Site Request Forgery

2020-01-08 00:00

Strategic Overview

Status: Patched in 1.2
Affected Plugin: Ultimate Category Excluder
Affected Version: <= 1.1
CVSS: 8.8High
Weakness type: CWE-352 · Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
CVE: CVE-2020-35135

View all Ultimate Category Excluder vulnerabilities

At a glance

CVE-2020-35135 is a high-severity Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the Ultimate Category Excluder WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 1.1. 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 1.2; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed January 2020, reported by Yaniv Nizry.

Vulnerability Overview

The Ultimate Category Excluder plugin before 1.2 for WordPress allows ultimate-category-excluder.php CSRF.

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 Ultimate Category Excluder <= 1.1 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 Ultimate Category Excluder the fix is 1.2: builds <= 1.1 are affected, anything from 1.2 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 1.2, or a newer patched version

How does WordSec protect against this?

The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to Ultimate Category Excluder: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Ultimate Category Excluder 1.2 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

Firewall
Alerts

External References

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2020-35135 https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/0e30d2ca-1918-4fcf-979e-7cae0d84529e https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2020-35135

CVSS Vector

8.8

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Base

Attack VectorNetwork
Attack ComplexityLow
Privileges RequiredNone
User InteractionRequired
ScopeUnchanged
ConfidentialityHigh
IntegrityHigh
AvailabilityHigh

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