Critical Flaw Uncovered in WordPress Backup Plugin Used by Over 3 Million Sites

Patches have been issued to include a “significant” security vulnerability in UpdraftPlus, a WordPress plugin with more than three million installations, that can be weaponized to download the site’s private facts using an account on the susceptible web sites.

“All variations of UpdraftPlus from March 2019 onwards have contained a vulnerability induced by a missing permissions-stage check, making it possible for untrusted people access to backups,” the maintainers of the plugin stated in an advisory printed this week.

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Security researcher Marc-Alexandre Montpas of Automattic has been credited with exploring and reporting the vulnerability on February 14 that’s been assigned the identifier CVE-2022-0633 (CVSS score: 8.5). The issue impacts UpdraftPlus versions from 1.16.7 to 1.22.2.

UpdraftPlus is a backup and restoration solution that is capable of executing entire, guide, or scheduled backups of WordPress information, databases, plugins and themes, which can then be reinstated by way of the WordPress admin dashboard.

A consequence of this defect is that it lets any logged-in consumer on a WordPress set up with UpdraftPlus put in to physical exercise the privilege of downloading an present backup – permissions which really should have been reserved for administrative buyers only.

Over and above leaking passwords and other confidential data, it could also “in some instances web page takeover if the attacker is capable to acquire database credentials from a configuration file and effectively obtain the website databases,” WordPress security corporation Wordfence explained.

Users of the UpdraftPlus plugin are recommended to update to variation 1.22.3 (or 2.22.3 for the Top quality variation) to mitigate any opportunity exploitation. The most recent version out there as of February 17 is 1.22.4, which addresses bugs connected to printing automobile-backup possibilities on PHP 8.

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