This article is a part of our Vulnerability Database (back to index)
Cross-Site Request Forgery occurrences in Nextgen Gallery
A Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) issue in the NextGEN Gallery plugin before 3.5.0 for WordPress allows File Upload and Local File Inclusion via settings modification, leading to Remote Code Execution and XSS. (It is possible to bypass CSRF protection by simply not including a nonce parameter.) (2021-02-09, CVE-2020-35942)
A Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) issue in the NextGEN Gallery plugin before 3.5.0 for WordPress allows File Upload. (It is possible to bypass CSRF protection by simply not including a nonce parameter.) (2021-02-09, CVE-2020-35943)
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.