<p>A privilege escalation flaw in WordPress’ popular WP GDPR Compliance plugin has led to exploitation of numerous WordPress sites. Site owners and administrators are encouraged to upgrade to the latest version of the affected plugin.</p>
<h2>Background</h2>
<p>WordPress plugin "<a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-gdpr-compliance/">WP GDPR Compliance</a>" versions before 1.4.3 are vulnerable to a privilege escalation attack. The attack doesn’t require authentication, and <a href="https://blog.sucuri.net/2018/11/erealitatea-net-hack-corrupts-websites-w... reports that attackers have already exploited a number of sites. Exploited sites had their siteurls changed to "hxxp://erealitatea[.]net".</p>
<h2>Impact assessment</h2>
<p>As of Noon ET on November 12, a curated Google search shows approximately 7,600 sites with changed URLs to 'erealitatea[.]net'. The malicious site seems to have been taken down, but when administrators and users attempt to interact with their Wordpress sites, most of the sites will completely fail to load or crash when administrators attempt to edit. </p>
<h2>Vulnerability details </h2>
<p>The affected plugin normally handles access and delete requests that are required for GDPR compliance, but versions of this plugin before 1.4.3 don’t properly sanitize the 'save_setting' action. Because of that, an attacker can inject arbitrary commands, which get stored until the plugin reaches its 'do_action()' call.</p>
<img src="/sites/drupal.dmz.tenablesecurity.com/files/images/blog/WP%20GDPR%20Compliance%20Plugin.jpg" width="1000" height="859" alt="A privilege escalation flaw in WordPress’ popular WP GDPR Compliance plugin has led exploitation of numerous WordPress sites." />
<p><i>Source: <a href="https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2018/11/privilege-escalation-flaw-in-wp-g...
<p>With these flaws, an attacker can gain administrative access to the site and make direct changes, including uploading malicious plugins for additional attacks.</p>
<h2>Urgently required actions.</h2>
<p>Administrators can manually edit the site’s database table <b>wp_options</b> to fix the URL if they’ve been attacked. The record <b>option_name</b> contains the “siteurl“ value. Admins can modify the domain in the <b>option_value</b> field.</p>
<p>With the URL fixed, the site should load normally, but we highly recommend checking for any malicious changes or uploads to the site, or restoring the site from an uncompromised backup. Once that step has been performed, site admins should immediately update the affected plugin to the latest version.</p>
<h2>Identifying affected systems</h2>
<p>A list of Tenable plugins to identify this vulnerability will appear <a href="https://www.tenable.com/plugins/search?q=cves%3A(%22CVE-2018-19207%22)&sort=&page=1">here</a> as they’re released.</p>
<h2>Get more information</h2>
<ul><li><a href="https://blog.sucuri.net/2018/11/erealitatea-net-hack-corrupts-websites-w... Blog</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2018/11/privilege-escalation-flaw-in-wp-g... technical blog</a></li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-gdpr-compliance/">WP GDPR Plugin page</a></li></ul></p>
<p><b><i>Learn more about <a href="https://www.tenable.com/products">Tenable</a>, the first Cyber Exposure platform for holistic management of your modern attack surface. Get a <a href="https://www.tenable.com/products/tenable-io/vulnerability-management/eva... 60-day trial</a> of Tenable.io Vulnerability Management. </i></b></p>