WordPress plugins are widely adopted and an attractive target for attackers. In this technical blog post we analyze the most critical vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins of 2017 and share insights about how static code analysis can detect these.

flatCore is a lightweight Content Management System (CMS) based on PHP and SQLite. We tested the latest stable version 1.4.6 with RIPS and detected, among others, a critical persistent cross-site scripting vulnerability (CVE-2017-1000428) that can be used by an unauthenticated adversary to attack administrators and to execute PHP code on the web server.

With over 84 million downloads, Joomla! is one of the most popular content management systems. Our code analysis solution RIPS detected a previously unknown LDAP injection vulnerability in the login controller. This one vulnerability could allow remote attackers to leak the super user password and to fully take over any Joomla! <= 3.7.5 installation that uses LDAP for authentication.

The 23rd gift in our advent calendar presents security issues in e107, a content management system that is in development since 2013. Among others, we identified a critical issue that allows any user to update his permissions and to extract sensitive information from the database by exploiting a PHP Object Injection vulnerability.

Today’s gift in our advent calendar contains descriptions of vulnerabilities in Kliqqi, the successor to the popular Pligg CMS mostly used for the creation of interactive social communities. Due to missing CSRF protection, an attacker is able to prepare a website that ultimately leads to code execution on the applications server when visited by a target.