One SQL injection and three cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities have been patched with the release of Joomla 3.8.4 last week. The latest version of the open-source content management system (CMS) also includes more than 100 bug fixes and improvements.
The XSS and SQL injection vulnerabilities affect the Joomla core, but none of them appear to be particularly dangerous – they have all been classified by Joomla developers as “low priority.”
The XSS flaws affect the Uri class (versions 1.5.0 through 3.8.3), the com_fields component (versions 3.7.0 through 3.8.3), and the Module chrome (versions 3.0.0 through 3.8.3).
The SQL injection vulnerability is considered more serious – Joomla developers have classified it as low severity, but high impact.
The security hole, tracked as CVE-2018-6376, affects versions 3.7.0 through 3.8.3. The issue was reported to Joomla by RIPS Technologies on January 17 and a patch was proposed by the CMS’s developers the same day.
In a blog post published on Tuesday, RIPS revealed that the vulnerability found by its static code analyzer is a SQL injection that can be exploited by an authenticated attacker with low privileges (i.e. Manager account) to obtain full administrator permissions.
“An attacker exploiting this vulnerability can read arbitrary data from the database. This data can be used to further extend the permissions of the attacker. By gaining full administrative privileges she can take over the Joomla! installation by executing arbitrary PHP code,” said RIPS researcher Karim El Ouerghemmi.
The researcher explained that this is a two-phase attack. First, the attacker injects arbitrary content into the targeted site’s database, and then they create a special SQL query that leverages the previously injected payload to obtain information that can be used to gain admin privileges.
This is not the first time RIPS has found a vulnerability in Joomla. In September, the company reported identifying a flaw that could have been exploited by an attacker to obtain an administrator’s username and password by guessing the credentials character by character.
Related: Joomla Patches Dangerous Security Flaws
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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