Cybersecurity researchers have found one more crucial safety flaw within the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress that would permit unauthenticated customers to take management of arbitrary accounts.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-44000 (CVSS rating: 7.5), impacts variations earlier than and together with 6.4.1. It has been addressed in model 6.5.0.1.
“The plugin suffers from an unauthenticated account takeover vulnerability which permits any unauthenticated customer to achieve authentication entry to any logged-in customers and at worst can acquire entry to an Administrator stage position after which malicious plugins may very well be uploaded and put in,” Patchstack researcher Rafie Muhammad mentioned.
The invention follows an in depth safety evaluation of the plugin, which beforehand led to the identification of a crucial privilege escalation flaw (CVE-2024-28000, CVSS rating: 9.8). LiteSpeed Cache is a well-liked caching plugin for the WordPress ecosystem with over 5 million energetic installations.
The brand new vulnerability stems from the truth that a debug log file named “/wp-content/debug.log” is publicly uncovered, which makes it doable for unauthenticated attackers to view probably delicate info contained within the file.
This might additionally embrace consumer cookie info current inside HTTP response headers, successfully permitting customers to log in to a susceptible website with any session that’s actively legitimate.
The decrease severity of the flaw is owing to the prerequisite that the debug function should be enabled on a WordPress website for it to achieve success. Alternatively, it might additionally have an effect on websites that had activated the debug log function sooner or later prior to now, however have didn’t take away the debug file.
It is necessary to notice that this function is disabled by default. The patch addresses the issue by shifting the log file to a devoted folder throughout the LiteSpeed plugin folder (“/wp-content/litespeed/debug/”), randomizing filenames, and dropping the choice to log cookies within the file.
Customers are suggested to verify their installations for the presence of the “/wp-content/debug.log” and take steps to purge them if the debugging function has (or had) been enabled.
It is also advisable to set an .htaccess rule to disclaim direct entry to the log recordsdata as malicious actors can nonetheless instantly entry the brand new log file in the event that they know the brand new filename by way of a trial-and-error technique.
“This vulnerability highlights the crucial significance of guaranteeing the safety of performing a debug log course of, what information shouldn’t be logged, and the way the debug log file is managed,” Muhammad mentioned.
