Privilege escalation in WP GDPR Compliance - CVE-2018-19207
Published: November 11, 2018 / Updated: July 30, 2020
Vulnerability details
The vulnerability allows a remote attacker to gain elevated privileges on the target system.
The weakness exists due to the software fail to do capability checks when executing its internal action save_setting to make such configuration changes when processing arbitrary options and values to this endpoint. A remote attacker can set the users_can_register option to 1, and change the default_role of new users to “administrator” to simply fill out the form at /wp-login.php?action=register and immediately access a privileged account, change these options back to normal and install a malicious plugin or theme containing a web shell or other malware to further infect the victim site.
Note: this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild.
Affected software
How to mitigate CVE-2018-19207
Links to Public Exploits and PoC-codes
- Exploit #3674 - wp-plugins-poc (Collection of WordPress Plugin PoC - For Educational Purposes ONLY) (July 30, 2020)
- Exploit #3593 - wp-plugins-poc (Collection of WordPress Plugin PoC - For Educational Purposes ONLY) (July 25, 2020)
- Exploit #1972 - wp-plugins-poc (Collection of WordPress Plugin PoC - For Educational Purposes ONLY) (March 18, 2020)
- Exploit #86 - WordPress WP GDPR Compliance Plugin Privilege Escalation (March 18, 2020)
- Exploit #222 - WP-GDPR-Compliance-Plugin-Exploit (Exploit of the privilege escalation vulnerability of the WordPress plugin "WP GDPR Compliance" by "Van Ons" (https://de.wordpress.org/plugins/wp-gdpr-compliance/) CVE-2018-19207) (March 18, 2020)