"Critical Vulnerability in Premium Gift Cards WordPress Plugin Exploited in Attacks"
Security researchers that are a part of Defiant’s Wordfence team have discovered a critical-severity vulnerability in the YITH WooCommerce Gift Cards premium WordPress plugin. This vulnerability is currently being exploited in attacks. The researchers noted that the YITH WooCommerce Gift Cards plugin allows online merchants to create gift cards that their customers can purchase for their friends to use on the ecommerce store. The premium plugin has more than 50,000 installations. Tracked as CVE-2022-45359 (CVSS score of 9.8), the exploited vulnerability was reported in November, and a patch for it was made available soon after. The researchers described the issue as an arbitrary file upload, allowing attackers to upload executable files to the WordPress sites that use a vulnerable version of the plugin. No authentication is required for successful exploitation. According to the researchers, an attacker can exploit the vulnerability to place a backdoor on a vulnerable installation, gain remote code execution (RCE), and potentially take over the site. The researchers noted that the security defect was found in an import function running on the admin_init hook, which runs for all pages in the /wp-admin/ directory. Because the impacted function lacks cross-site request forgery (CSRF) and capability checks, an unauthenticated attacker could trigger the flaw by sending special requests containing specific parameters and payloads. The researchers stated that since the function also does not perform any file type checks, any file type, including executable PHP files, can be uploaded. The researchers noted that site admins can identify signs of an attack by checking their logs for POST requests to wp-admin/admin-post.php. According to the researchers, observed attacks came from hundreds of IP addresses, but only two IPs were responsible for the majority of exploitation attempts. Most of the attacks occurred one day after the vulnerability was publicly disclosed, but they do continue. Site admins are advised to update to YITH WooCommerce Gift Cards premium version 3.20.0 or newer, which contains patches for this vulnerability.