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WordPress Plugin Vulnerability Dump – Part 1
This post contains information on vulnerabilities for 7 (at least somewhat) popular WordPress plugins. All of these vulnerabilities were trivial to discover (and are trivial to fix). The state of WordPress plugin security is very sad indeed. None of the developers were contacted in advance of this post (except where otherwise noted). Additional vulnerabilities will be posted as time permits. WordPress Plugin Vulnerability Dump – Part 1
WordPress 3.9.2 Security Release fixes XML-RPC DoS
WordPress 3.9.2 is now available as a security release for all previous versions. We strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately. This release fixes a possible denial of service issue in PHP’s XML processing, reported by Nir Goldshlager of the Salesforce.com Product Security Team. It was fixed by Michael Adams and Andrew Nacin of the WordPress security team and David Rothstein of the Drupal security team. This is the first time our two projects have coordinated on joint security releases.
Send authenticated SMTP email over TLS from WordPress
How to configure TLS for SMTP email in WordPress. I was suprised WordPress is not able to send email using an SMTP server out-of-the-box. Not to mention using authenticated SMTP or TLS transport for security. A quick Google search showed me multiple plugins to handle this, but I wanted to create something myself. Here is how to override the wp-mail() function and send email using authenticated SMTP and StartTLS from WordPress.
Huge increase in WordPress xmlrpc.php POST requests
WordPress xmlprc.php DDoS and brute-force attacks. How to identify, block, mitigate and leverage these xmlrpc.php scans, brute-force, and user enumeration attacks on WordPress sites… Secure WordPress xmlprc.php interface and reduce service disruption.
WordPress wp_options table autoload micro-optimization
Learn how to optimize WordPress’ wp_options table for faster database results. This probably isn’t a big issue, but today I noticed a slow MySQL query coming from a WordPress database (WordPress wp_options table). This made me investigate and to optimize the WordPress wp_options table “autoload” feature. The autoload feature loads and caches all autoloaded options, if available, or all options. The default option is to autoload, and over time when the wp_options table grows, this degrades performance.
Set or remove the read-only attribute assigned to files with PHP chmod
Chmod.php, change file attributes with PHP, to make files read only or normally accessible on Windows IIS servers. Sometimes you need chmod to make files read only on your website, or make them normally accessible in case they already are read only. For instance Drupal’s settings.php configuration file, or WordPress Contact Form 7 temporary captcha files, are examples of read-only files.
How to load google-code-prettify syntax highlighting without plugins
If you run a WordPress blog where you display (parts of) source code, syntax highlighting is a must! It prettifies the code which makes it easier to read and it distinguishes code from text. However, most syntax highlighting is made available through plugins, and we all know too many plugins bring a lot of overhead to your blog.
Various articles (tech and non-tech)
This post provides links to some articles I found last week. The posts might be interesting in various fields of expertise, for either system administrators or developers (DevOps). Topics include: web security, WordPress performance, jQuery, ASP.NET MVC caching, partial trust, view state MAC, and fixing IIS website hangs.
WordPress CMS admin password reset
How to reset a lost WordPress password: If you’ve lost or forgotten your WordPress admin password, you can easily reset the password. Either use the following MySQL statement to reset your WordPress admin password, or change it through functions.php.
Don’t turn off CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, fix your PHP configuration
An often heard solution to PHP cURL errors with SSL is to turn off CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER. Please don’t turn off CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, but fix your PHP config instead. This article provides you two solutions to solve CA certificate validation errors with PHP cURL and OpenSSL. For system administrators and end-users.
Grep for forensic log parsing and analysis on Windows Server IIS
How to use GnuWin32 ported tools like grep.exe and find.exe for forensic log file analysis in Windows Server. In this article I’ll give some real live examples of using these ported GnuWin tools like grep.exe for logfile analysis on Windows servers. The article provides three example, as an alternative to LogParser, because finding spam scripts fast is often very important.
WordPress 3.5 on IIS 8.0 is unable to save a web.config file
This website Saotn.org is hosted on Windows Server 2012 with IIS 8.0 with WordPress for a few months now, and everything is running very smooth. And I would never hit this bug because I don’t need to change my permalinks structure, or save any other plugin setting which would want write to a web.config file. One of my colleagues on the other hand, just moved his website to one of our IIS 8.0 web servers and he noticed he couldn’t save his Permalinks structure in the IIS web.config file. This can be pretty annoying 😉 Quick fix attached…
WordPress Crayon Syntax Highlighter Plugin “wp_load” Remote File Inclusion Vulnerability
Charlie Eriksen has discovered a vulnerability in the Crayon Syntax Highlighter plugin for WordPress, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a vulnerable system. Input passed to the “wp_load” parameter in wp-content/plugins/crayon-syntax-hightlighter/util/ajax.php and wp-content/plugins/crayon-syntax-hightlighter/util/preview.php is not properly verified before being used to include files. This can be exploited to include arbitrary PHP files from external FTP resources.