This article is a part of our Vulnerability Database (back to index)
Cross-Site Request Forgery occurrences in Tawk.to Live Chat
The Tawk.To Live Chat WordPress plugin before 0.6.0 does not have capability and CSRF checks in the tawkto_setwidget and tawkto_removewidget AJAX actions, available to any authenticated user. The first one allows low-privileged users (including simple subscribers) to change the 'tawkto-embed-widget-page-id' and 'tawkto-embed-widget-widget-id' parameters. Any authenticated user can thus link the vulnerable website to their own Tawk.to instance. Consequently, they will be able to monitor the vulnerable website and interact with its visitors (receive contact messages, answer, ...). They will also be able to display an arbitrary Knowledge Base. The second one will remove the live chat widget from pages. (2021-12-06, CVE-2021-24914)
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.