Patreon Wordpress Cross-Site Request Forgery

The Jetpack Scan team identified a Cross-Site Request Forgery vulnerability in the Patreon WordPress plugin before 1.7.0, allowing attackers to make a logged administrator disconnect the site from Patreon by visiting a specially crafted link. (2021-04-12, CVE-2021-24231)

The Jetpack Scan team identified a Cross-Site Request Forgery vulnerability in the Patreon WordPress plugin before 1.7.0, allowing attackers to make a logged in user overwrite or create arbitrary user metadata on the victim’s account once visited. If exploited, this bug can be used to overwrite the “wp_capabilities” meta, which contains the affected user account’s roles and privileges. Doing this would essentially lock them out of the site, blocking them from accessing paid content. (2021-04-12, CVE-2021-24230)

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.