WordPress Social Warfare plugin zero-day exploited in attacks

A Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability in Social Warfare installations (v3.5.1 and v3.5.2) is actively exploited to add malicious redirects.

The vulnerability in the WordPress plugin has been fixed with the release of the 3.5.3 version of the plugin.

Vulnerable versions of the Social Warfare plugin are currently installed on more than 70,000 websites. The plugin was temporarily removed from the WordPress plugin store and was later added again after the zero-day flaw has been addressed.

This flaw could allow remote unauthenticated attackers to execute JavaScript code stored in the database of WordPress websites that use vulnerable versions of the Social Warfare plugin.

“Earlier today, an unnamed security researcher published a full disclosure of a stored Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability present in the most recent version of popular WordPress plugin Social Warfare. The plugin, which was subsequently removed from the WordPress.org plugin repository, has an active install base of over 70,000 sites.” reads the analysis published by WordPress security firm Wordfence.

“The flaw allows attackers to inject malicious JavaScript code into the social share links present on a site’s posts. “

Mikey Veenstra, Wordfence threat analyst, added that visitors of compromised WordPress websites are redirected to a series of malicious sites (i.e. pornography, tech support scam website, etc,) and attackers tracked their activity via cookies.

The development team at Social Warfare confirmed that threat actors are actively exploiting the zero-day flaw in attacks in the wild.

Users that for some reason could not update the Social Warfare plugin have to disable it.

The plugin’s download history info shows that there were roughly 21K downloads recorded after the disclosure of the zero-day, this means that that are tens of thousands of websites still running vulnerable versions.

In the same hours of the disclosure of the Social Warfare flaw, another
zero-day flaw was abused by two threat groups in attacks in the wild. This second zero-day resides in “Easy WP SMTP,” a WordPress plugin with over 300,000 active installs.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – WordPress plugin, Social Warfare)

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