CVE-2012-0826 in Drupal
Summary
by MITRE
Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the Aggregator module in Drupal 6.x before 6.23 and 7.x before 7.11 allows remote attackers to hijack the authentication of unspecified victims for requests that update feeds and possibly cause a denial of service (loss of updates due to rate limit) via unspecified vectors.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 01/09/2022
The CVE-2012-0826 vulnerability represents a critical cross-site request forgery flaw within Drupal's Aggregator module, affecting versions prior to 6.23 and 7.11. This vulnerability operates at the application layer and specifically targets the module responsible for aggregating RSS and Atom feeds from external sources. The flaw enables remote attackers to manipulate authenticated users into executing unauthorized actions without their knowledge or consent, creating a significant security risk for Drupal installations. The vulnerability's impact extends beyond simple data manipulation to potentially disrupt service availability through rate limiting mechanisms that govern feed update operations.
The technical implementation of this CSRF vulnerability stems from the Aggregator module's failure to properly validate request origins and implement adequate anti-CSRF tokens for critical operations. When users navigate to malicious sites or receive crafted payloads, the vulnerability allows attackers to submit requests that update feed configurations or trigger feed processing operations. The attack vector typically involves embedding malicious JavaScript or HTML forms that automatically submit requests to the vulnerable Drupal instance using the authenticated user's session cookies. This mechanism exploits the trust relationship between the web application and the user's browser, leveraging the fact that the browser automatically includes authentication credentials with requests to the same domain.
The operational impact of this vulnerability manifests in several ways that compromise both data integrity and service availability. Attackers can hijack authenticated sessions to update feed configurations, potentially redirecting users to malicious content or inserting harmful feed entries. The vulnerability also creates opportunities for denial of service conditions when attackers repeatedly trigger feed update operations, exhausting rate limiting mechanisms and causing legitimate updates to fail. This disruption can lead to complete loss of feed functionality within the application, affecting content delivery and user experience. The vulnerability's severity is amplified by its potential to affect unspecified victims, meaning that any authenticated user with appropriate privileges could become compromised, including administrators with elevated permissions.
Mitigation strategies for CVE-2012-0826 involve immediate patching of affected Drupal installations to versions 6.23 and 7.11 or later, which contain the necessary CSRF protection mechanisms. Organizations should implement comprehensive security monitoring to detect unauthorized feed updates and establish proper input validation for all feed-related operations. Network-level protections such as web application firewalls can help detect and block suspicious CSRF patterns, while application-level defenses should include robust anti-CSRF token implementation and strict request origin validation. The vulnerability aligns with CWE-352, which categorizes cross-site request forgery flaws, and maps to ATT&CK technique T1566.001 for initial access through spearphishing attachments, highlighting the importance of comprehensive security hygiene and regular patch management protocols.