Pierluigi Paganini February 13, 2020

Developers of the popular WordPress GDPR Cookie Consent plugin have addressed a critical bug that could potentially impact 700K users.

Critical vulnerabilities in the WordPress GDPR Cookie Consent plugin could be exploited by potential attackers to delete and change the content of the sites and inject malicious JavaScript code due to improper access controls.

The GDPR Cookie Consent plugin assists users in making your website GDPR compliant.  The vulnerability was reported to the development team by the security researcher Jerome Bruandet from NinTechNet.

“The save_contentdata method allows the administrator to save the GDPR cookie notice to the database as a page post type” wrote NinTechNet.

“An authenticated user such as a subscriber can use it to put any existing page or post (or the entire website) offline by changing their status from “published” to “draft”:” “Additionally, it is possible to delete or change their content. Injected content can include formatted text, local or remote images as well as hyperlinks and shortcodes.”

The WordPress plugin is developed by WebToffee that addressed the flaw with the release of version 1.8.3, less than a week after the disclosure of the issues. The vulnerabilities affect version 1.8.2 and earlier.

The security firm WordFence also independently confirmed the flaw after the development team has addressed it. WordFence analyzed the plugin after it was fixed and noticed were a number of code changes related to capabilities check added to an AJAX endpoint used in the plugin’s administration pages.

“Because the AJAX endpoint was intended to only be accessible to administrators, the vulnerability allows subscriber-level users to perform a number of actions that can compromise the site’s security.” states WordFence.

An attacker could exploit the flaw to inject JavaScript code that will be automatically loaded and executed every time a user (authenticated or not) visits the /cli-policy-preview/ page.”

“[the issue is caused by] improper access controls lead to a stored cross-site scripting vulnerability in the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin” states the analysis published by WordFence.

Giving a look at the download history of the plugin we can see that no more than 82,000 users have installed the latest version of the plugin, this means that more than 600K installations are still vulnerable.

DOWNLOADS HISTORY

Security experts at WordFence recently reported that over 200K WordPress sites are exposed to attacks due to a high severity cross-site request forgery (CSRF) bug (CVE-2020-8417) in Code Snippets.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – WordPress GDPR Cookie Consent, hacking)

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