A logic flaw in the way WordPress created blog posts allowed attackers to access features only administrators were supposed to have (CVE-2018-20152). This lead to a Stored XSS and Object Injection in the WordPress core and more severe vulnerabilities in WordPress’s most popular plugins Contact Form 7 and Jetpack.

The holiday season is coming up again and it’s time for some security fun. For the third time in a row, we are proud to announce our PHP security advent calendar. This year, we will analyze 24 exciting security bugs that we detected in the most widespread WordPress plugins.

A new PHP exploit technique affects the most famous forum software phpBB3. The vulnerability allows attackers who gain access to an administrator account to execute arbitrary PHP code and to take over the entire board (CVE-2018-19274).

Pydio is a popular file sharing solution used by enterprises and governments around the world. It suffered from a highly critical vulnerability that allowed unauthenticated attackers to compromise the entire file sharing server and to execute arbitrary code on the remote machine (CVE-2018-20718). Find out more about the impact and technical details in our blog post.

A flaw in the way WordPress handles privileges can lead to a privilege escalation in WordPress plugins. This affects for example WooCommerce, the most popular e-commerce plugin with over 4 million installations. The vulnerability allows shop managers to delete certain files on the server and then to take over any administrator account (CVE-2018-20714).