Eight security flaws and 62 bugs have been addressed with the release of WordPress 4.7.1 on Wednesday. The latest update for the content management system (CMS) has been classified as a security release.
The list of vulnerabilities fixed this week includes the recently disclosed remote code execution flaw affecting PHPMailer. While WordPress Core and the plugins analyzed by the WordPress security team don’t appear to be affected by the weakness, PHPMailer has been updated to patched version 5.2.22 as a precaution.
Chris Jean and Brian Krogsgard reported an information disclosure vulnerability. The experts discovered that the REST API exposed data on all users who had authored a post of a public post type.
The latest update also patches two cross-site request forgery (CSRF) flaws. One of them, discovered by Ronnie Skansing, affects the accessibility mode of widget editing, while the other, reported by Abdullah Hussam, can be exploited via a specially crafted Flash file.
A couple of cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities have also been fixed. These affect the plugin name or version header in the update-core.php file, and “theme name fallback.”
The latest WordPress update also addresses a weak crypto issue related to multisite activation keys and a flaw described in the release notes as “post via email checks mail.example.com if default settings aren’t changed.”
These vulnerabilities affect WordPress 4.7 and earlier. Since version 4.7 has been downloaded more than 10 million times since its release in December, malicious actors have plenty of potential targets if they find a way to exploit one of these flaws.
WordPress continues to be the most hacked CMS. According to data from web security firm Sucuri, of all the hacked websites monitored by the company, nearly three-quarters ran WordPress.
A recent study conducted by RIPS Technologies has showed that more than 8,800 of the roughly 48,000 plugins available in the official WordPress plugins directory are affected by at least one vulnerability.
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Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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