Dangerous Vulnerability Found in eCommerce WordPress Plugin

Researchers have identified an information leak and access control bypass vulnerability in the popular WP eCommerce plugin for WordPress.

The WP eCommerce WordPress plugin is used by many people to sell physical items, downloads and memberships online. The plugin has been downloaded more than 2.9 million times from the official WordPress website.

The security hole affecting the application, identified by researchers at Sucuri, can be leveraged by a remote attacker to gain access to names, email addresses, billing addresses and other information belonging to users who have made purchases via the plugin. According to researchers, the bug can also be leveraged to modify information.

“An attacker could perform administrative-related tasks without actually being authenticated as an administrator on the target website. Using this vulnerability, one could send a few requests to the websites database, dumping all client personal information (including names, emails, addresses, etc),” Sucuri researcher Mickael Nadeau wrote in a blog post. “It is also possible for someone to buy products and change the status of their transaction to Accepted Payment without actually making the payment.”

The vulnerability, which affects WP eCommerce 3.8.14.3 and earlier, has been assigned a “medium” severity rating. The disclosure of the flaw coincides with the release of version 3.8.14.4 in which this and other non-security bugs have been addressed.

Sucuri hasn’t released too many technical details on the flaw to prevent malicious actors from exploiting it, but researchers say the vulnerability is similar to one affecting the MailPoet newsletter plugin. The existence of the MailPoet issue was brought to light by the security company in July.

“The plugin developers assumed that the WordPress’s admin_init hook was only called when the administrator was logged in and visited a page inside /wp-admin/. However, any call to /wp-admin/admin-post.php (or admin-ajax) also executes this hook without requiring the user to be authenticated,” Nadeau explained.

The vulnerability in WP eCommerce has been added to the recently launched WPScan Vulnerability Database. So far, the database contains information on more than 1,300 vulnerabilities affecting WordPress plugins, and over 700 flaws affecting the platform itself.

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