2023’s Critical WordPress Vulnerabilities and How They Work
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In 2023, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team’s primary focus was to research high-impact, high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities. This means that we spent a lot of time looking for vulnerabilities like arbitrary file uploads, user password resets, authentication bypasses, and privilege escalations. Fortunately, we were able to discover a lot of these vulnerabilities and get them remediated before attackers could find and exploit them.
Now that we have launched our Bug Bounty Program that pays the biggest bounties for the most impactful research, we hope to continue a positive trend of researchers finding critical, high impact vulnerabilities and responsibly disclosing those through our program so we can work with vendors to ensure they get patched.
In today’s post, we’d like to highlight some of the big vulnerabilities of 2023 that we focused on, along with providing some background on these vulnerability types.
2023 Wordfence Critical Vulnerability Research in Review
Authentication Bypass
An authentication bypass vulnerability occurs when an attacker exploits weaknesses in the authentication mechanism to log into a user’s account, typically a high-privileged user. These vulnerabilities make it easy for threat actors to completely compromise a vulnerable WordPress site with minimal user interaction and often easy automation.
Authentication bypass exploits are special in that the attacker does not change or even know the credentials, but instead bypasses the authentication process. This means that the victim does not notice the attack, because their account is not changed, and the WordPress website administrator can log in in the same way.
Note that most authentication bypass vulnerabilities in WordPress also bypass two-factor authentication, so even that does not protect against the attack. It’s important to run a WordPress specific web application firewall, such as Wordfence, to provide protection against these types of attacks.
As seen, a single exploit request is enough for the attacker to gain administrator privileges on the website.
The Wordfence Team found a total of 13 authentication bypass vulnerabilities in 2023. You can find the details of these vulnerabilities below.
UserPro
Source: wordfence.com