Tag Archives: Woocommerce User Email Verification

29 Apr 2019

Sucuri Doesn’t Care That WordPress Plugin with Unfixed Vulnerability They Believe Is Being Exploited Is Still in the Plugin Directory

When it comes to our full disclosures of vulnerabilities as a protest of the continued inappropriate behavior of the WordPress Support Forum moderators, we are certainly not above criticism, but it is incredible to us that other security companies escape any criticism despite repeatedly doing things that seems out of line with them actually caring about keeping websites secure. In a post earlier today we noted how a security journalist didn’t link to our post about a vulnerability we full disclosed, apparently due to including a proof of concept for confirming that vulnerability exists, while linking to a post from the web security company Sucuri providing payloads for how hackers were trying to exploit vulnerabilities. That seems hypocritical, but looking at Sucuri’s post we noticed something else, they seemed to be unconcerned that a plugin with an unfixed vulnerability that they believed was being exploited was still in the Plugin Directory.

In their post they provide this information: [Read more]

29 Apr 2019

Security Journalists Odd Treatment of Proof of Concepts for WordPress Plugin Vulnerabilities

We think that good security journalism is something that could greatly help to improve the poor state of not just the security surrounding WordPress plugins, but security in general. Unfortunately what we have found is that security journalists seem to almost uniformly seem to do a very bad job. As a less serious example of that, recently we have seen odd responses from security journalists to us including proof of concepts with vulnerabilities we are disclosing.

Some of that seems like it could originating with the security company behind the Wordfence Security plugin, Defiant, who make claims like this (while waiting until after vulnerabilities are widely exploited to warn people that they are using plugins likely to be exploited, which is too late): [Read more]

11 Mar 2019

Full Disclosure of Option Update Vulnerability in Woocommerce User Email Verification

On Friday we detailed a privilege escalation vulnerability in the plugin Woocommerce User Email Verification. While that is a very bad security vulnerability in terms of what could be done with it, it at least could be seen as mistake as opposed to a failure to handle security in a fundamental way. That can’t be said about an option update vulnerability our proactive monitoring of changes made to plugins in the Plugin Directory to try to catch serious vulnerabilities spotted in the plugin at the same time.

The plugin registers the function save_tab_settings() to run during init, so when WordPress is loading: [Read more]

8 Mar 2019

Vulnerability Details: Privilege Escalation in Woocommerce User Email Verification

The latest version of the plugin Woocommerce User Email Verification got flagged by both our monitoring of changelog entries for mentions of security issues and our proactive monitoring of changes made to plugins in the Plugin Directory to try to catch serious vulnerabilities. What we have seen so far in looking into what was flagged by the proactive monitoring makes the vulnerability fixed in the version not surprising and probably is a good indication that you shouldn’t use the plugin if you are concerned with security. But for the purposes of this post let’s focus on the vulnerability fixed.

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