CVE-2021-38342

Nested Pages <= 3.1.15 - Cross-Site Request Forgery to Arbitrary Post Deletion and Modification

2021-08-25 00:00
Ram

Strategic Overview

Status
Patched in 3.1.16
Affected Plugin
Nested Pages
Affected Version
<= 3.1.15
CVSS
8.1High
Weakness type
CWE-352 · Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
CVE
CVE-2021-38342
View all Nested Pages vulnerabilities

At a glance

CVE-2021-38342 is a high-severity Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the Nested Pages WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 3.1.15. It carries a CVSS score of 8.1 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity; high integrity, availability impact). Exploitation requires no authentication. The issue is fixed in version 3.1.16; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed August 2021, reported by Ram.

Vulnerability Overview

The Nested Pages WordPress plugin <= 3.1.15 was vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery via the `npBulkAction`s and `npBulkEdit` `admin_post` actions, which allowed attackers to trash or permanently purge arbitrary posts as well as changing their status, reassigning their ownership, and editing other metadata.

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 integrity, availability.

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

Reaching this weakness in Nested Pages <= 3.1.15 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 Nested Pages the fix is 3.1.16: builds <= 3.1.15 are affected, anything from 3.1.16 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 3.1.16, or a newer patched version

How does WordSec protect against this?

The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to Nested Pages: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Nested Pages 3.1.16 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

  • Firewall
  • Alerts

External References

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2021-38342https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/ecbbe9f0-bf6c-4153-9843-8ae7713adef9https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-38342

Related records

Vulnerability data © Defiant, Inc., provided under the Wordfence Intelligence T&C