The NextGen Gallery development team has discovered two magnificent CSRF vulnerabilities while protecting your sites from potential takeover attacks.

This WordPress plugin was used to create image galleries and it has more than 800,000 active users, as their security updates are the top priority for all the users who installed and used this plugin.

These two discovered vulnerabilities are categorized as highly rated and very critical by Wordfence’s who discovered it.

What Followed by This Attack?

Both of them are using Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) bugs which are also tracked as the major vulnerability as CVE-2020-35942, and move the Reflected Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) are remote code execution (RCE) attacks through a file upload or Local File Inclusion (LFI).

Hackers behind this attack can exploit these security flaws by manipulating the WordPress admins by clicking on specific links or file attachments that are used to execute malicious code in their web browser.

Whereas, this entire attack also needs social engineering, because the hacker has to phished the admin by clicking over alike that he created to steal the data for their system.

As it gets successfully exploited, the vulnerabilities will let the hackers create a malicious redirect, abuse on compromised sites, take over the sites, inject spam, and ultimately do other things. Once the attacker gets control over Remote Code Execution on a website then they completely takeover that site.

Since the XSS can also be used to take over the site in case the hacker tricks the admin to visit the pages that runs malicious scripts or as looks as the attacks that used to target XSS vulnerabilities. However, the XSS can also be used to spread backdoor on the infected sites.

Who is Influenced by this?

According to the security researcher, more than 530,000 sites are exposed by this attack and on 5th December the plugin’s creator has disclosed all the details related to this attack. After that, on 16th December the publisher patched the vulnerabilities present on revealed version 3.5.0 on 17th December 2020. As the NextGen Gallery was out in December, it has only 266000 new users that include both updates and new installs.

The entire list of active users is about 530,000 that will be at the risk of Malware installation and may be compromised by this bug.