Hackers Can Inject Code Into WordPress Sites via Flaw in Product Review Plugin

A vulnerability addressed recently in the WP Product Review Lite plugin for WordPress could be abused by unauthenticated attackers to hack websites.

WP Product Review Lite is designed for creating product reviews on WordPress websites. It supports the creation of a top products review widget and also allows monetization through the addition of a “buy now” button in posts. The plugin has more than 40,000 installations.

Last week, the team of developers behind the plugin addressed an unauthenticated persistent Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability that could have been exploited to inject code into all of a website’s product pages.

The issue, Sucuri security researchers explain, is that, although all user input data is sanitized, one of the employed WordPress functions can be bypassed if the attacker sets a parameter inside an HTML attribute.

“A successful attack results in malicious scripts being injected in all the site’s products,” the researchers explain.

An attack can be launched without authentication, which means that threat actors can automate attacks, Sucuri warns. This makes it easy for cybercriminals to mount attacks against a large number of vulnerable websites.

“The number of active installs, the ease of exploitation, and the effects of a successful attack are what makes this vulnerability particularly dangerous,” Sucuri’s researchers note.

Sucuri reported the vulnerability on May 13 and a patch was released the next day, with version 3.7.6 of WP Product Review Lite.

While no active exploitation attempts have been observed, the security researchers recommend that site admins upgrade to the patched version as soon as possible, as older iterations of the plugin remain vulnerable to attacks and potential compromise.

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