CVE-2015-9300 in events-manager Plugin
Summary
by MITRE
The events-manager plugin before 5.5.7 for WordPress has multiple XSS issues.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 10/08/2024
The events-manager plugin for WordPress versions prior to 5.5.7 contained multiple cross-site scripting vulnerabilities that posed significant security risks to WordPress installations. These vulnerabilities allowed attackers to inject malicious scripts into web pages viewed by other users, potentially leading to session hijacking, data theft, or unauthorized administrative actions. The plugin's failure to properly sanitize user input across multiple endpoints created persistent attack vectors that could be exploited by malicious actors without requiring authentication.
The technical flaw stemmed from inadequate input validation and output escaping mechanisms within the plugin's codebase. Specifically, the vulnerability occurred when user-supplied data was directly incorporated into HTML output without proper sanitization or encoding. This weakness manifested in various locations including event submission forms, administrative interfaces, and calendar display components. The lack of consistent sanitization practices across different input points meant that attackers could exploit these flaws through multiple entry points, making the attack surface significantly larger than typical single-vulnerability scenarios.
From an operational impact perspective, these XSS vulnerabilities created substantial risks for WordPress site administrators and end users. Attackers could exploit these flaws to steal user sessions, redirect visitors to malicious sites, or inject malicious code that would execute in the context of other users' browsers. The vulnerabilities were particularly concerning because they affected the plugin's administrative functionality, potentially allowing attackers to escalate privileges or modify event data. The widespread adoption of the events-manager plugin meant that numerous WordPress installations were potentially vulnerable, creating a large attack surface for threat actors.
The security implications of these vulnerabilities align with CWE-79 which describes cross-site scripting flaws in software applications. The specific attack patterns correspond to those documented in the ATT&CK framework under TA0001 Initial Access and TA0003 Persistence phases. The vulnerabilities could be leveraged to establish persistent access through session hijacking or to deliver additional payloads that would execute in the victim's browser context. Organizations using affected versions faced potential data breaches, unauthorized modifications to event content, and possible complete compromise of user sessions.
Mitigation strategies for this vulnerability required immediate patching to version 5.5.7 or later, which addressed the input sanitization issues throughout the plugin. Additionally, administrators should implement proper input validation at multiple layers, including server-side sanitization of all user-provided data before storage and output encoding before display. Network-level protections such as web application firewalls could provide additional defense-in-depth measures, though the primary solution remained the application of the security patch. Regular security audits of WordPress plugins and maintaining updated software versions formed essential practices for preventing similar vulnerabilities in the future.