The developers of WordPress have released version 4.7.2 on Thursday to address three vulnerabilities affecting earlier versions of the content management system (CMS).
One of the flaws addressed by this security release is a SQL injection in WP_Query, a class that handles the intricacies of a post’s requests to a WordPress blog.
The vulnerability, reported by developer Mohammad Jangda, affects WP_Query when passing unsafe data. While the WordPress core is not affected, some improvements have been made to prevent themes and plugins from accidentally introducing a flaw.
Another weakness patched in WordPress 4.7.2 is a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability found by Ian Dunn of the WordPress security team in the posts list table.
David Herrera of Alley Interactive discovered an access control issue. He found that the user interface for assigning taxonomy terms in “Press This” is shown to users who don’t have the necessary permissions.
While none of these vulnerabilities seem critical from the description provided by WordPress developers, an advisory published by US-CERT says a “remote attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected website.”
WordPress 4.7.2 was released less than two weeks after version 4.7.1, which addressed 62 bugs and eight security holes, including remote code execution, information disclosure, cross-site request forgery (CSRF), XSS and crypto-related issues.
WordPress is still the most targeted CMS. According to web security firm Sucuri, of all the hacked websites monitored by the company last year, a majority ran WordPress.
A recent study conducted by RIPS Technologies has showed that over 8,800 of the 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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