Strategic Overview
- Status
- Patched in 4.20.3
- Affected Plugin
- Word Balloon
- Affected Version
<= 4.20.2- CVSS
- 4.3Medium
- Weakness type
- CWE-352 · Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
- CVE
CVE-2023-5884
At a glance
CVE-2023-5884 is a medium-severity Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the Word Balloon WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 4.20.2. It carries a CVSS score of 4.3 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity). Exploitation requires no authentication. The issue is fixed in version 4.20.3; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed November 2023, reported by Krzysztof Zając.
Vulnerability Overview
The Word Balloon plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery in all versions up to, and including, 4.20.2. This is due to missing or incorrect nonce validation on the 'delete' action. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to delete arbitrary avatars 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.
CWE-352: Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
Word Balloon <= 4.20.2 carries this weakness at delete, and reaching it 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 Word Balloon the fix is 4.20.3: builds <= 4.20.2 are affected, anything from 4.20.3 onward is not.
Remediation
Update to version 4.20.3, or a newer patched version
How does WordSec protect against this?
The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to Word Balloon: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Word Balloon 4.20.3 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.
- Firewall
- Alerts
External References
Related records
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