A crucial safety flaw has been disclosed within the WPML WordPress multilingual plugin that might enable authenticated customers to execute arbitrary code remotely beneath sure circumstances.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-6386 (CVSS rating: 9.9), impacts all variations of the plugin earlier than 4.6.13, which was launched on August 20, 2024.
Arising as a result of lacking enter validation and sanitization, the difficulty makes it doable for authenticated attackers, with Contributor-level entry and above, to execute code on the server.
WPML is a well-liked plugin used for constructing multilingual WordPress websites. It has over a million energetic installations.
Safety researcher stealthcopter, who found and reported CVE-2024-6386, mentioned the issue lies within the plugin’s dealing with of shortcodes which might be used to insert publish content material corresponding to audio, pictures, and movies.
“Particularly, the plugin makes use of Twig templates for rendering content material in shortcodes however fails to correctly sanitize enter, resulting in server-side template injection (SSTI),” the researcher mentioned.
SSTI, because the identify implies, happens when an attacker is ready to use native template syntax to inject a malicious payload into an online template, which is then executed on the server. An attacker might then weaponize the shortcoming to execute arbitrary instructions, successfully permitting them to take management of the positioning.
“This WPML launch fixes a safety vulnerability that might enable customers with sure permissions to carry out unauthorized actions,” the plugin maintainers, OnTheGoSystems, mentioned. “This challenge is unlikely to happen in real-world eventualities. It requires customers to have modifying permissions in WordPress, and the positioning should use a really particular setup.”
Customers of the plugin are really helpful to use the newest patches to mitigate in opposition to potential threats.
