Missing Authorization in Shareaholic Plugin

Executive Summary

CVE-2024-24709 is a Broken Access Control vulnerability in the WordPress Shareaholic Plugin, versions 9.7.11 and below. It occurs due to missing authorization, authentication, or nonce token checks, which allows unprivileged users to perform actions that should require higher privileges.

This means that users without proper permissions can exploit the vulnerability to bypass security controls and carry out unauthorized operations within the plugin.

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Impact Analysis

This vulnerability can allow attackers to perform higher-privileged actions on websites using the affected Shareaholic plugin versions, potentially compromising the security and integrity of the site.

Since the vulnerability affects thousands of websites regardless of size or popularity, exploitation could lead to unauthorized changes, data manipulation, or other malicious activities.

Immediate action such as updating the plugin to version 9.7.12 or later is recommended to mitigate this risk.

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Detection Guidance

This vulnerability involves missing authorization in the Shareaholic WordPress plugin, allowing unprivileged users to perform higher-privileged actions. Detection typically involves monitoring for unauthorized access attempts or unusual privilege escalations related to the plugin.

Since the vulnerability is related to broken access control in the Shareaholic plugin versions 9.7.11 and below, detection can include checking the plugin version installed on your WordPress site.

Suggested commands to detect the vulnerable plugin version on your WordPress installation include:

• Using WP-CLI to check the plugin version: wp plugin list | grep shareaholic
• Manually inspecting the plugin version in the WordPress admin dashboard under Plugins.

Additionally, monitoring web server logs for suspicious requests attempting to exploit access control weaknesses in Shareaholic could help detect exploitation attempts.

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Mitigation Strategies

The immediate recommended step to mitigate this vulnerability is to update the Shareaholic WordPress plugin to version 9.7.12 or later, where the issue has been patched.

Until the update can be applied, it is advised to implement mitigation rules provided by Patchstack to block attacks targeting this vulnerability.

Regularly monitor your website for unauthorized access attempts and ensure proper access control configurations are in place.

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Compliance Impact

The vulnerability in Shareaholic involves broken access control allowing unprivileged users to perform higher-privileged actions due to missing authorization checks.

Such broken access control issues can potentially lead to unauthorized access to sensitive data or functionality, which may impact compliance with standards and regulations like GDPR or HIPAA that require strict access controls and protection of personal or sensitive information.

However, the provided information does not explicitly describe the direct impact of this vulnerability on compliance with GDPR, HIPAA, or other common standards.

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