Description
The Welcome Software Publishing plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Arbitrary Options Update in all versions up to and including 0.0.31. This is due to a missing capability check in the nc_setOption() function, which is exposed via the nc.setOption XML-RPC method. The function authenticates the user via $wp_xmlrpc_server->login() (verifying credentials are valid) but does not perform any authorization check such as current_user_can('manage_options'). This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Subscriber-level access and above, to update arbitrary WordPress options via XML-RPC requests. This can be leveraged to change the default_role option to 'administrator' and then register a new administrator account, achieving full privilege escalation and site takeover.
Affected products
Version statuses are supplied by the assigning organization. Consult the original record for detailed ranges and platform conditions.
newscred Welcome Software Publishing
Default version status: unaffected
0 to ≤ 0.0.31affected
References
- https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/47e53fd3-4e3f-433a-8e70-3a58c864184a?source=cve ↗
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/newscred-publishing/trunk/newscred.php#L272 ↗
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/newscred-publishing/tags/0.0.31/newscred.php#L272 ↗
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/newscred-publishing/trunk/newscred.php#L264 ↗
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/newscred-publishing/tags/0.0.31/newscred.php#L264 ↗
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/newscred-publishing/trunk/newscred.php#L265 ↗
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/newscred-publishing/tags/0.0.31/newscred.php#L265 ↗
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/newscred-publishing/trunk/newscred.php#L44 ↗
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/newscred-publishing/tags/0.0.31/newscred.php#L44 ↗