WP Photo Album Plus <= 9.3.02.002 - Authenticated (Custom+) Command Injection via 'value' Parameter (crop item) in update-photo AJAX Action

The WP Photo Album Plus plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to authenticated Command Injection in all versions up to, and including, 9.3.02.002 via the `value` parameter of the `update-photo` AJAX action. This is due to insufficient shell escaping within the `wppa_image_magick_a()` function, where the attacker-controlled `value` parameter is concatenated raw — without `escapeshellarg()` — into an ImageMagick command string before being passed to `exec()`; further, `wppa_decode()` actively restores percent-encoded shell metacharacters (e.g., `%26`→`&`, `%23`→`#`) rather than stripping them, allowing crafted payloads to survive sanitization and break out of the ImageMagick argument context. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers holding the plugin-defined `wppa_upload` capability to execute arbitrary operating-system commands as the web-server user, achieving full remote code execution on the underlying server. Exploitation requires ImageMagick to be enabled on the server; the `wppa_upload` capability is a plugin-level privilege that site administrators may grant to lower-privileged WordPress roles via the plugin's Users settings, broadening the pool of potential attackers beyond administrators.

An attacker needs Custom access first, so the firewall sees the attempt as traffic from a logged-in account: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. Classes like this one can leave something behind, so the staged malware scanner is the second half: it looks for dropped files and modified code rather than for the request that created them. None of that substitutes for the fix: WP Photo Album Plus 9.3.02.003 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

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