CVE-2023-23996
WordPress vulnerability analysis and mitigation

Overview

A Stored Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability was discovered in the ProfilePress Membership Team ProfilePress WordPress plugin versions 4.5.3 and below. The vulnerability was identified on January 20, 2023, and requires administrator or higher privileges to exploit (Patchstack Advisory).

Technical details

The vulnerability occurs due to insufficient sanitization and escaping of certain parameters in the plugin. This could allow high-privilege users such as administrators to perform Stored Cross-Site Scripting attacks, even when the unfiltered_html capability is disallowed, such as in multisite setups. The vulnerability has been assigned a CVSS v3.1 base score of 4.8 (Medium) by NIST with a vector string of CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:R/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:N, while Patchstack assessed it with a score of 5.9 (Medium) (NVD Database, WPScan).

Impact

The vulnerability could allow malicious actors with administrative privileges to inject malicious scripts, including redirects, advertisements, and other HTML payloads into the website. These injected scripts would then be executed when visitors access the affected site (Patchstack Advisory).

Exploitability

The vulnerability requires high privileges (administrator or above) to exploit and user interaction for successful execution. It has been classified as having a low severity impact and is considered unlikely to be exploited in the wild (Patchstack Advisory).

Mitigation and workarounds

The vulnerability has been patched in version 4.5.4 of the ProfilePress plugin. Users are advised to update to version 4.5.4 or later to remove the vulnerability. Patchstack users can enable auto-update for vulnerable plugins as an additional security measure (Patchstack Advisory).

Additional resources


SourceThis report was generated using AI

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