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Found an exploit in a really old Wordpress plugin...

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I was browsing through the Wordfence Web Application Firewall log of my Wordpress site, and I found something interesting. Thankfully it was blocked by Wordfence so that's good—it never did any damage to my site. I don't even have the plugin installed on my site so again, good.

However, I digress—I found an exploit in an old Wordpress plugin. So old that it doesn't seem that Wordpress even lists it as a plugin to be installed. Thankfully.

However, the plugin does exist. I found it on Github and after a little bit of investigation, one of the files in that plugin is indeed vulnerable to that very exploit. A path traversal exploit. There's no input validation or cleanup before passing it to a PHP read() function.

What do I do with this knowledge? Is there a possibility that sites out there have this plugin installed and are vulnerable to this exploit?

Obviously, I don't want to publish this exploit or the name of the plugin publicly since well... duh. But what do I do? I have no idea how to responsibly disclose this vulnerablity.
 
Since it's on Github then I would report it to Github. Hopefully they will at least take it down which would be a big step in the right direction.
 
Is the plugin still maintained at all? If so create an issue in their GH that explains you've found a vuln and asks for a direct non-public contact to reach out to, in order to detail it so they can fix it.

If it's abandoned then not much you can do, and if it's old enough to be abandoned it's really on the people using that plugin to stop using abandonware.
 
Last edited:
Someone suggested that I disclose it to PatchStack. I've done just that.
 
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