Zero-day vulnerability in WP GDPR Compliance

Privilege escalation
CVE-2018-19207

Vulnerability exploitation has been spotted in the wild by WordPress website owners. The initial attack was first reported on October 13. The attackers used vulnerability in plugin to gain administrative privileges on the affected websites.

Vulnerability details

Advisory: SB2018111101 - Privilege escalation in GDPR Compliance plugin for WordPress

Vulnerable component: WP GDPR Compliance

CVE-ID: CVE-2018-19207

CVSSv3 score: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H/E:H/RL:O/RC:C

CWE-ID: CWE-264 - Permissions, Privileges, and Access Controls

Description:

The vulnerability allows a remote attacker to gain elevated privileges on the target system.

The weakness exists due to the software fail to do capability checks when executing its internal action save_setting to make such configuration changes when processing arbitrary options and values to this endpoint. A remote attacker can set the users_can_register option to 1, and change the default_role of new users to тАЬadministratorтАЭ to simply fill out the form at /wp-login.php?action=register and immediately access a privileged account, change these options back to normal and install a malicious plugin or theme containing a web shell or other malware to further infect the victim site.

Note: this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild.

External links:

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-installed-itself-and-activated-itself-on-my-site/

About zero-day vulnerabilities

Zero-day vulnerability is an undisclosed vulnerability in software that hackers can exploit to compromise computer programs, gain unauthorized access to sensitive data, penetrate networks, etc. We consider vulnerability a zero-day when there is no solution provided from software vendor and the vulnerability is being actively exploited by malicious actors.

Zero-day candidate is a potential zero-day vulnerability in software which might have been used in targeted attacks, however there is no evidence to support this suggestion.