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Cross-Site Request Forgery occurrences in Button Widget Smartsoft
The Button Widget Smartsoft plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery in versions up to, and including, 1.0.1. This is due to missing nonce validation on the smartsoftbutton_settings page. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to update the plugins settings and inject malicious web scripts via a forged request granted they can trick a site administrator into performing an action such as clicking on a link. (2022-07-18, CVE-2022-1912)
Why Cross-Site Request Forgery can be dangerous
The absence of Anti-CSRF tokens may lead to a Cross-Site Request Forgery attack that can result in executing a specific application action as another logged in user, e.g. steal their account by changing their email and password or silently adding a new admin user account when executed from the administrator account.
The attacker may copy one of your web application forms, e.g. email/password change form.
The webpage will contain a form with the exact set of fields as the original application but with input values already provided and the submit button replaced with a Javascript code causing auto-submission. When the page is accessed the form will be immediately submitted and page contents replaced with a valid content or a redirect to your original application.
One of your application users who is already logged in can be then tricked to navigate to such malicious page e.g. by clicking a link in a phishing email, and the pre-populated form content will be submitted to your application like it would be submitted by your user.