CVE-2019-19979

WP Maintenance <= 5.0.5 - Cross-Site Request Forgery to Stored Cross-Site Scripting

2019-11-19 00:00

Strategic Overview

Status: Patched in 5.0.6
Affected Plugin: WP Maintenance
Affected Version: <= 5.0.5
CVSS: 8.8High
Weakness type: CWE-352 · Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
CVE: CVE-2019-19979

At a glance

CVE-2019-19979 is a high-severity Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the WP Maintenance WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 5.0.5. It carries a CVSS score of 8.8 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity; high availability impact). Exploitation requires no authentication. The issue is fixed in version 5.0.6; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed November 2019, reported by Chloe Chamberland.

Vulnerability Overview

A flaw in the WordPress plugin, WP Maintenance before 5.0.6, allowed attackers to enable a vulnerable site's maintenance mode and inject malicious code affecting site visitors. There was CSRF with resultant XSS.

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 availability.

CWE-352: Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)

Reaching this weakness in WP Maintenance <= 5.0.5 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 WP Maintenance the fix is 5.0.6: builds <= 5.0.5 are affected, anything from 5.0.6 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 5.0.6, or a newer patched version

How does WordSec protect against this?

The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to WP Maintenance: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: WP Maintenance 5.0.6 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

Firewall
Alerts

External References

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2019-19979 https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/5f2fa602-79db-4bb3-a55c-75da59116f06 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-19979

Related records

Other vulnerabilities in WP Maintenance

CVSS Vector

8.8

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

Base

Attack VectorNetwork
Attack ComplexityLow
Privileges RequiredNone
User InteractionRequired
ScopeChanged
ConfidentialityLow
IntegrityLow
AvailabilityHigh

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