Joined: 14 Jun 2003 Posts: 16777215 Location: Netherlands, Europe
Posted: Mon Jul 05, 2010 10:26 am Post subject: Mind your WordPress plugins...
A little reminder that one should always check something for vulnerabilities if you can. Quite recently, I had to rebuild a clients' website locally for some customisations (WordPress and some plugins).
After installing it, I noticed some obscure errors while loading the page. The exact error I do not remember though, but it was reason to inspect the plugins. I discovered that one was quite "backdoor-ish" in its behaviour.
This is what was executed every time that WordPress rendered a page:
I.e. this pings "home" every time that a page is rendered, sending information about the visitor.
Apart from that itself being very very naughty, couple it with the fact that this plugin supplied a publically accessible script that has this code in it:
Code:
$r = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT rating_".$_POST['rating']." FROM ".$wpdb->posts." WHERE ID = '".$_POST['id']."'");
...and you got your website set-up for an SQL injection, where the original author has a nice list of websites that have installed his evil plugin...
Now, it is debatable whether the author has done this on purpose. The author could simply be completely security-unaware, and could simply not give anything about privacy when writing that phone-home routine, which interestingly contains the comment "Please keep this. Thanks "...
The lucky thing is that the domain that this plug-in tried to reach expired a month ago -- most probably the initial error I had was related to that....
This is a real problem for most wordpress users who aren't familair with php and so have no way of knowing whether their service has a back-door vulnerability or not.
I would say, for best practice, only download plugins through the wordpress.org website [or backend from your wordpress admin page], these plugins and themes are tested by wordpress, any third part plugins you acquire from elsewhere aren't tested or monitored by wordpress.org.
I had a minor issue of downloading a theme from directly from a devlopers wbesite, and it contained an encoded footer backlink to dubious sources.
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