This article is a part of our Vulnerability Database (back to index)
Cross-Site Request Forgery occurrences in Nested Pages
The Nested Pages WordPress plugin <= 3.1.15 was vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery via the `npBulkAction`s and `npBulkEdit` `admin_post` actions, which allowed attackers to trash or permanently purge arbitrary posts as well as changing their status, reassigning their ownership, and editing other metadata. (2021-08-30, CVE-2021-38342)
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.