WordPress Plugin Vulnerabilities

Contact Form 7 <= 5.0.3 - register_post_type() Privilege Escalation

Description

According to the official release:

"A privilege escalation vulnerability has been found in Contact Form 7 5.0.3 and older versions. Utilizing this vulnerability, a logged-in user in the Contributor role can potentially edit contact forms, which only Administrator and Editor-role users are allowed to access by default. This issue has been reported by Simon Scannell from RIPS Technologies.

To minimize damage from possible attacks utilizing those vulnerabilities, Contact Form 7 5.0.4 and higher will restrict the local file attachment feature. More particularly, you will no longer be able to specify an absolute file path that refers to a file placed outside the wp-content directory. You can still specify files inside the wp-content directory with relative or absolute file paths, so all you need to change is the location of the attachment files."

According to the changelog:

"Specifies the capability_type argument explicitly in the register_post_type() call to fix the privilege escalation vulnerability issue."

Affects Plugins

Fixed in 5.0.4

References

Classification

Miscellaneous

Original Researcher
Simon Scannell from RIPS Technologies
Submitter
Ryan Dewhurst
Submitter twitter
Verified
No

Timeline

Publicly Published
2018-09-04 (about 7 years ago)
Added
2018-09-12 (about 7 years ago)
Last Updated
2020-09-22 (about 5 years ago)

Other