Recent versions of the content management system (CMS) Concrete5 address several vulnerabilities, including security holes reported by Italy-based researcher Egidio Romano of Minded Security.
Romano published on Thursday three advisories for the vulnerabilities he reported on May 5 to Concrete5 developers via the HackerOne security response and bug bounty platform.
One of the issues is a SQL injection vulnerability that can be exploited by an attacker with edit page privileges to inject and execute arbitrary SQL commands. According to the expert, the flaw affects Concrete5 5.7.3.1, 5.7.4, and probably other versions. Users can protect themselves against potential attacks by updating to version 5.7.4.1 or later.
Romano also identified an email-related vulnerability that can be leveraged for arbitrary PHP code execution. The flaw can be exploited by an authenticated attacker with administrator privileges or via a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attack.
The attack only works when the Sendmail service is used to send out emails, the researcher said. The vulnerability has been patched with the release of Concrete5 5.7.4.
The expert also reported a total of six reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities that exist because user input passed through various parameters is not properly sanitized. These issues have also been resolved with the release of version 5.7.4.
Concrete5, a CMS written in PHP, was launched in 2003 as Concrete CMS. It was rebranded as Concrete5 and launched fully open source under the MIT license in 2008. According to the official website, Concrete5 powers more than 580,000 sites and has a community with over 230,000 members.
A State of the Web report released by CodeGuard for the first quarter of 2015 shows that Concrete5 has a market share of 2.8%, which puts it in the fourth position, after WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.