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Unknown threat actors have hijacked the update system for the Smart Slider 3 Pro plugin for WordPress and Joomla to push a poisoned version containing a backdoor. The incident impacts Smart Slider 3 Pro version 3.5.1.35 for WordPress, per WordPress security company Patchstack. Smart Slider 3 is a popular WordPress slider plugin with more than 800,000 active installations across its free and Pro editions. "An unauthorized party gained access to Nextend’s update infrastructure and distributed a fully attacker-authored build through the official update channel," the company said . "Any site that updated to 3.5.1.35 between its release on April 7, 2026, and its detection approximately 6 hours later received a fully weaponized remote access toolkit." Nextend, which maintains the plugin, said an unauthorized party gained unauthorized access to its update system and pushed a malicious version (3.5.1.35 Pro) that remained accessible for approximately six hours, before ...

A security vulnerability has been disclosed in the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress that could enable unauthenticated users to escalate their privileges. Tracked as  CVE-2023-40000 , the vulnerability was addressed in October 2023 in version 5.7.0.1. "This plugin suffers from unauthenticated site-wide stored [cross-site scripting] vulnerability and could allow any unauthenticated user from stealing sensitive information to, in this case, privilege escalation on the WordPress site by performing a single HTTP request," Patchstack researcher Rafie Muhammad  said . LiteSpeed Cache , which is used to improve site performance, has more than five million installations. The latest version of the plugin is 6.1, which was released on February 5, 2024. The WordPress security company said CVE-2023-40000 is the result of a lack of user input sanitization and  escaping output . The vulnerability is rooted in a function named update_cdn_status() and can be reproduced in a defa...

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 admi...