LiteSpeed Cache Plugin Exposes 5 Million WordPress Sites to Privilege Escalation

by | Feb 28, 2024 | News

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A critical security vulnerability has been unveiled in the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress, posing a significant risk of privilege escalation for unauthenticated users. Tracked as CVE-2023-40000, this vulnerability was addressed in October 2023 with the release of version 5.7.0.1 of the plugin.

According to Patchstack researcher Rafie Muhammad, the vulnerability exposes WordPress sites to unauthenticated site-wide stored cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. This could potentially allow any unauthorized user to steal sensitive information and escalate their privileges on the affected WordPress site with a single HTTP request.

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LiteSpeed Cache, utilized to enhance site performance, boasts over five million installations. Despite the patch released in October 2023, the latest version of the plugin, 6.1, was rolled out on February 5, 2024.

The vulnerability, as explained by Patchstack, stems from a lack of input sanitization and output escaping in a function named update_cdn_status(). This flaw can be exploited even in a default installation of the plugin.

Muhammad further elucidates that since the XSS payload is injected as an admin notice, it can be displayed on any wp-admin endpoint, making it susceptible to exploitation by any user with access to the wp-admin area.

This disclosure comes just four months after Wordfence uncovered another XSS flaw in the same LiteSpeed Cache plugin (CVE-2023-4372, CVSS score: 6.4). This prior vulnerability, addressed in version 5.7 of the plugin, stemmed from insufficient input sanitization and output escaping on user-supplied attributes.

István Márton from Wordfence emphasized that this flaw allowed authenticated attackers with contributor-level permissions or higher to inject arbitrary web scripts into pages, executing whenever a user accessed the compromised page.

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Source: thehackernews.com

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