A cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the Elementor plugin for WordPress could allow an unauthenticated attacker to create administrator accounts.
Threat actors can exploit the flaw by tricking a logged-in administrator into opening a malicious link, causing the victim’s authenticated session to perform a REST API action permitted by their account.
On default installations, the result is the creation of an administrator account under the control of the attacker.
The Elementor Website Builder is a popular WordPress plugin active on 10 million websites that lets users create websites using a drag-and-drop interface.
The CSRF flaw has yet to receive an identifier and impacts only versions 4.3.0 and 4.3.1. According to statistics from WordPress.org, the two versions are used by up to 2 million sites.
Security firm Patchstack reported the vulnerability to the Elementor team on September 22 after receiving it from bug hunter “Saggre.” Elementor released a fix two days later, in version 4.3.2 of the plugin.
According to Patchstack’s analysis, the CSRF flaw is caused by Elementor’s Editor Events module checking the raw request URI for the elementor/v1/events/ path and bypassing WordPress’s REST nonce validation when that string is present.
Because the URI also contains attacker-controlled query parameters, attackers can append the path to requests targeting other REST endpoints and trick logged-in users into executing them with their existing privileges.
Patchstack says the flaw can be abused in one-click attacks against a logged-in administrator to create a new attacker-controlled admin account.
“One link, opened by a logged-in WordPress user, makes that user carry out any REST API action their account is permitted to perform,” Patchstack explains.
The security firm says that the attack does not require JavaScript, an attacker-controlled webpage, or a submitted form, and the link can be delivered to the target via email, a chat message, or a comment on the site.
Elementor releases before 4.3.0 do not contain the affected Editor Events proxy, but those older versions are vulnerable to other flaws, some of which are already actively exploited.
Users of the plugin are recommended to upgrade to Elementor version 4.3.2 as soon as possible, which prevents attackers from triggering the bypass through the query string.
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