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New Flaw in WordPress Plugin Used by Over a Million Sites Under Active Exploitation

New Flaw in WordPress Plugin Used by Over a Million Sites Under Active Exploitation

May 12, 2023 Vulnerability / Website Security
A security vulnerability has been disclosed in the popular WordPress plugin  Essential Addons for Elementor  that could be potentially exploited to achieve elevated privileges on affected sites. The issue, tracked as CVE-2023-32243, has been addressed by the plugin maintainers in version 5.7.2 that was shipped on May 11, 2023. Essential Addons for Elementor has over one million active installations. "This plugin suffers from an unauthenticated privilege escalation vulnerability and allows any unauthenticated user to escalate their privilege to that of any user on the WordPress site," Patchstack researcher Rafie Muhammad  said . Successful exploitation of the flaw could permit a threat actor to reset the password of any arbitrary user as long as the malicious party is aware of their username. The shortcoming is believed to have existed since version 5.4.0. This can have serious ramifications as the flaw could be weaponized to reset the password associated with an administ
Hackers Exploiting WordPress Elementor Pro Vulnerability: Millions of Sites at Risk!

Hackers Exploiting WordPress Elementor Pro Vulnerability: Millions of Sites at Risk!

Apr 01, 2023 Web Security / Cyber Threat
Unknown threat actors are actively exploiting a recently patched security vulnerability in the Elementor Pro website builder plugin for WordPress. The flaw, described as a case of broken access control, impacts versions 3.11.6 and earlier. It was addressed by the plugin maintainers in version 3.11.7 released on March 22. "Improved code security enforcement in WooCommerce components," the Tel Aviv-based company  said  in its release notes. The premium plugin is  estimated  to be used on over 12 million sites. Successful exploitation of the high-severity flaw allows an authenticated attacker to complete a takeover of a WordPress site that has WooCommerce enabled. "This makes it possible for a malicious user to turn on the registration page (if disabled) and set the default user role to administrator so they can create an account that instantly has the administrator privileges," Patchstack  said  in an alert of March 30, 2023. "After this, they are likely t
Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Mar 21, 2024Operational Technology / SCADA Security
When you read reports about cyber-attacks affecting operational technology (OT), it's easy to get caught up in the hype and assume every single one is sophisticated. But are OT environments all over the world really besieged by a constant barrage of complex cyber-attacks? Answering that would require breaking down the different types of OT cyber-attacks and then looking back on all the historical attacks to see how those types compare.  The Types of OT Cyber-Attacks Over the past few decades, there has been a growing awareness of the need for improved cybersecurity practices in IT's lesser-known counterpart, OT. In fact, the lines of what constitutes a cyber-attack on OT have never been well defined, and if anything, they have further blurred over time. Therefore, we'd like to begin this post with a discussion around the ways in which cyber-attacks can either target or just simply impact OT, and why it might be important for us to make the distinction going forward. Figure 1 The Pu
Critical RCE Flaw Reported in WordPress Elementor Website Builder Plugin

Critical RCE Flaw Reported in WordPress Elementor Website Builder Plugin

Apr 18, 2022
Elementor, a WordPress website builder plugin with over five million active installations, has been found to be vulnerable to an authenticated remote code execution flaw that could be abused to take over affected websites. Plugin Vulnerabilities, which  disclosed  the flaw last week, said the bug was introduced in version 3.6.0 that was released on March 22, 2022. Roughly  37% of users  of the plugin are on version 3.6.x. "That means that malicious code provided by the attacker can be run by the website," the researchers said. "In this instance, it is possible that the vulnerability might be exploitable by someone not logged in to WordPress, but it can easily be exploited by anyone logged in to WordPress who has access to the WordPress admin dashboard." In a nutshell, the issue relates to a case of arbitrary file upload to affected websites, potentially leading to code execution. The bug has been addressed in the latest version of Elementor, with Patchstack 
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Critical Bug Found in WordPress Plugin for Elementor with Over a Million Installations

Critical Bug Found in WordPress Plugin for Elementor with Over a Million Installations

Feb 02, 2022
A WordPress plugin with over one million installs has been found to contain a critical vulnerability that could result in the execution of arbitrary code on compromised websites. The plugin in question is  Essential Addons for Elementor , which provides WordPress site owners with a library of over 80 elements and extensions to help design and customize pages and posts. "This vulnerability allows any user, regardless of their authentication or authorization status, to perform a local file inclusion attack," Patchstack  said  in a report. "This attack can be used to include local files on the filesystem of the website, such as /etc/passwd. This can also be used to perform RCE by including a file with malicious PHP code that normally cannot be executed." That said, the vulnerability only exists if widgets like dynamic gallery and product gallery are used, which utilize the vulnerable function, resulting in local file inclusion – an attack technique in which a web
Flaws in Two Popular WordPress Plugins Affect Over 7 Million Websites

Flaws in Two Popular WordPress Plugins Affect Over 7 Million Websites

Mar 18, 2021
Researchers have disclosed vulnerabilities in multiple WordPress plugins that, if successfully exploited, could allow an attacker to run arbitrary code and take over a website in certain scenarios. The flaws were uncovered in  Elementor , a website builder plugin used on more than seven million sites, and  WP Super Cache , a tool used to serve cached pages of a WordPress site. According to Wordfence, which discovered the security weaknesses in Elementor, the bug concerns a set of  stored cross-site scripting  (XSS) vulnerabilities (CVSS score: 6.4), which occurs when a malicious script is injected directly into a vulnerable web application. In this case, due to a lack of validation of the HTML tags on the server-side, a bad actor can exploit the issues to add executable JavaScript to a post or page via a crafted request. "Since posts created by contributors are typically reviewed by editors or administrators before publishing, any JavaScript added to one of these posts would
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