WP Courses LMS <= 3.2.3 - Cross-Site Request Forgery

2023-11-14 00:00
Anonymous

Strategic Overview

At a glance

This record tracks a medium-severity Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the WP Courses LMS WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 3.2.3. 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 3.2.4; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed November 2023.

Vulnerability Overview

The WP Courses LMS – Online Courses Builder, eLearning Courses, Courses Solution, Education Courses plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery in all versions up to, and including, 3.2.3. This is due to missing nonce validation on several functions hooked via AJAX in the ~/ajax/ajax-lesson-order.php file. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to to perform several actions such as adding, deleting and renaming lesson modules 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)

Reaching this weakness in WP Courses LMS <= 3.2.3 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 WP Courses LMS the fix is 3.2.4: builds <= 3.2.3 are affected, anything from 3.2.4 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 3.2.4, or a newer patched version

How does WordSec protect against this?

The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to WP Courses LMS: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: WP Courses LMS 3.2.4 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

  • Firewall
  • Alerts

External References

Related records

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