Vulnerability Found in Yoast’s Google Analytics WordPress Plugin
Posted on March 21, 2015 by Kara Dunlap in Security
Yoast has released a new version of its popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress to address a persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that could have been exploited to execute arbitrary code.
Google Analytics by Yoast has been downloaded nearly 7 million times. The application allows WordPress administrators to monitor website traffic by connecting the plugin to their Google Analytics account.
The vulnerability was identified by Jouko Pynnonen, the CEO of Finland-based IT company Klikki Oy. Earlier this month, the expert reported identifying several vulnerabilities in the WPML premium WordPress plugin.
According to the researcher, an attacker can leverage a flaw in Google Analytics by Yoast to store arbitrary code in a targeted administrator’s WordPress dashboard. The code is executed as soon as the administrator opens the plugin’s settings panel.
The attack involves two security bugs. First, there is an access control flaw that allows an unauthenticated attacker to connect the plugin installed on the targeted website to his own Google Analytics account by overwriting existing OAuth2 credentials.
The second stage of the attack relies on the fact that the plugin renders an HTML dropdown menu based on data from Google Analytics. Because this data is not sanitized, an attacker can enter malicious code in the Google Analytics account and it gets executed when the targeted administrator views the plugin’s settings panel.
“Under default WordPress configuration, a malicious user can exploit this flaw to execute arbitrary server-side PHP code via the plugin or theme editors,” Pynnonen said in an advisory. “Alternatively the attacker could change the administrator’s password, create new administrator accounts, or do whatever else the currently logged-in administrator can do on the target site.”
The security issues have been addressed with the release of Google Analytics by Yoast version 5.3.3. The update also fixes a flaw that allowed administrators to launch XSS attacks against other administrators. This vulnerability was publicly disclosed back in February by Kaustubh G. Padwad and Rohit Kumar.
This isn’t the first time someone finds a vulnerability in a plugin from Yoast. Last week, UK-based researcher Ryan Dewhurst uncovered a blind SQL injection vulnerability in WordPress SEO by Yoast.
Tags:
XSS, XFS, Open Redirect Vulnerabilities Found on About.com
Posted on February 3, 2015 by Kara Dunlap in Security
About.com, the online resource website visited by tens of millions of users each month, is plagued by several types of potentially dangerous vulnerabilities, a researcher revealed on Monday.
According to Wang Jing, a PhD student at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, a large majority of the pages on About.com are vulnerable to cross-site scripting (XSS) and cross-frame scripting (XFS/iFrame injection) attacks.
The expert tested close to 95,000 About.com links with a script he developed and determined that at least 99.88% of them are vulnerable. The search field on the website’s homepage is also plagued by an XSS flaw which, according to Jing, means that all the domains related to about.com are vulnerable to XSS attacks.
In order to exploit XSS vulnerabilities, an attacker needs to convince the victim to click on a specially crafted link. XSS attacks can be used to alter the appearance of a website, access potentially sensitive information, and spy on users.
XFS attacks can be used to steal data from websites accessed by the victim. For the attack to work, a malicious actor must get the user to access a Web page he controls. Such vulnerabilities can also be exploited for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, the expert noted.
Jing has also identified open redirect bugs on several About.com pages. The vulnerabilities can be leveraged to trick users into visiting phishing and other malicious websites by presenting them with a link that apparently points to an about.com page.
“The vulnerabilities can be attacked without user login. Tests were performed on Microsoft IE (10.0.9200.16750) of Windows 8, Mozilla Firefox (34.0) & Google Chromium 39.0.2171.65-0 ubuntu0.14.04.1.1064 (64-bit) of Ubuntu (14.04)，Apple Safari 6.1.6 of Mac OS X Lion 10.7,” the researcher said in a blog post.
About.com was notified of the existence of the vulnerabilities back in October 2014, but so far the company hasn’t done anything to address them, the researcher said. About.com hasn’t responded to SecurityWeek’s requests for comment.
Poof-of-concept (PoC) videos for the XSS vulnerability on the About.com homepage and the open redirect flaw have been published by the researcher.
Tags:
Numerous Vulnerabilities Found in Zenoss Core Management Platform
Posted on December 8, 2014 by Kara Dunlap in Security
Researchers have uncovered a total of 20 security holes in Zenoss Core, the free, open-source version of the application, server, and network management platform Zenoss.
According to an advisory published on Friday by the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University (CERT/CC), the vulnerabilities were identified and reported by Ryan Koppenhaver and Andy Schmitz of Matasano Security.
One of the most serious flaws is CVE-2014-6261, which can be exploited by a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code.
“An attacker who is able to get a victim to visit an attacker-controlled website while logged in to the Zenoss interface can execute arbitrary code on the Zenoss installation. Additionally, an attacker who is able to perform a man-in-the-middle attack between the Zenoss installation and Zenoss’ corporate ‘callhome’ server – or control the ‘callhome’ server – can execute arbitrary code on the Zenoss installation,” reads Zenoss’ description of the vulnerability.
Another serious vulnerability (CVE-2014-9246) is caused by the fact that sessions don’t expire. In order to exploit the bug, an attacker needs to obtain a targeted user’s session ID and copy it to his own computer. When the victim logs in, the attacker will be logged in as that user.
Researchers have also identified cross-site request forgery (CSRF), persistent cross-site scripting (XSS), information disclosure, open redirect, authorization bypass, and denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerabilities. In addition, the experts discovered multiple issues related to passwords, including the lack of password complexity requirements, a weak hashing algorithm, and the storing of passwords in plaintext in the session database.
These vulnerabilities have been assigned the following CVE identifiers: CVE-2014-6253, CVE-2014-6254, CVE-2014-9245, CVE-2014-6255, CVE-2014-6256, CVE-2014-9247, CVE-2014-9248, CVE-2014-6257, CVE-2014-9249, CVE-2014-6258, CVE-2014-6260, CVE-2014-9251, CVE-2014-6259, CVE-2014-6262 and CVE-2014-9252.
The vulnerabilities affect Zenoss Core 4.2.4. Two of the flaws, the session expiration bug and an open redirect in the login form (CVE-2014-6255 and CVE-2014-9246), have been addressed by Zenoss with the release of the latest Zenoss Core 4.2.5 service pack, CERT/CC said. The company is internally tracking the other bugs and plans of fixing them in a future maintenance release of Zenoss Core 5, which is currently in beta.
Zenoss does not plan on addressing CVE-2014-9250, which can be exploited by an attacker to obtain a user’s username and password by retrieving the authentication cookie. The company advises customers who want to use cookie-based authentication to ensure their installations operate over SSL/HTTPS.
Tags:
