Thousands of WordPress websites were impacted by three remote code execution vulnerabilities that were identified in the PHP Everywhere plugin, the Wordfence team at WordPress security company Defiant warns.
With more than 30,000 downloads, the PHP Everywhere plugin is an open-source plugin designed to enable PHP code everywhere in the WordPress installation.
The latest PHP Everywhere iteration was released last month with patches for three critical vulnerabilities (CVSS score of 9.9) that could allow users with low privileges to execute code on the WordPress sites that use the plugin.
The most severe of these issues is CVE-2022-24663, a vulnerability that allows any authenticated user, including subscribers and customers, to “execute shortcodes via the parse-media-shortcode AJAX action,” Wordfence explains.
An attacker looking to exploit the bug would need to send a crafted request with a specific shortcode parameter to execute arbitrary PHP code on the site, which would typically lead to complete site takeover.
The other two security flaws, which are tracked as CVE-2022-24664 and CVE-2022-24665, require for the attacker to have at least contributor-level permissions on the vulnerable site, meaning that impact is less severe.
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CVE-2022-24664 existed because all users with the edit_posts capability, including untrusted contributors, could use the PHP Everywhere metabox. Thus, they could create a post containing PHP code in the PHP Everywhere metabox, and achieve code execution by previewing the post.
“While this vulnerability has the same CVSS score as the shortcode vulnerability, it is less severe, since it requires contributor-level permissions, which imply some degree of trust and are more difficult to obtain than subscriber-level permissions,” Wordfence says.
CVE-2022-24665 existed because, by default, all users with the edit_posts capability could use the PHP Everywhere Gutenberg block (this could be set to admin-only). Thus, contributor-level users could create a post, add the PHP everywhere block with code in it, and preview the post to achieve code execution.
The security holes were reported to PHP Everywhere’s maintainers on January 4. Version 3.0.0 of the plugin was released on January 10 with patches for all three vulnerabilities.
Related: Critical Flaw Impacts WordPress Plugin With 1 Million Installations
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