WordPress RSS Feed Retriever <= 1.6.7 - Cross-Site Request Forgery
Strategic Overview
- Status
- Patched in 1.6.8
- Affected Plugin
- RSS Feed Retriever
- Affected Version
<= 1.6.7- CVSS
- 4.3Medium
- Weakness type
- CWE-352 · Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
- CVE
CVE pending
At a glance
This record tracks a medium-severity Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the RSS Feed Retriever WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 1.6.7. 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 1.6.8; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed January 2023.
Vulnerability Overview
The WordPress RSS Feed Retriever plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery in versions up to, and including, 1.6.7. This is due to missing nonce validation on the rss_retriever_ajax_request() function. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to modify the plugin's settings 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)
RSS Feed Retriever <= 1.6.7 carries this weakness at rss_retriever_ajax_request(), 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 RSS Feed Retriever the fix is 1.6.8: builds <= 1.6.7 are affected, anything from 1.6.8 onward is not.
Remediation
Update to version 1.6.8, or a newer patched version
How does WordSec protect against this?
The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to RSS Feed Retriever: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: RSS Feed Retriever 1.6.8 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.
- Firewall
- Alerts
External References
Related records
Other vulnerabilities in RSS Feed Retriever
Vulnerability data © Defiant, Inc., provided under the Wordfence Intelligence T&C