This article is a part of our Vulnerability Database (back to index)
Cross-Site Request Forgery occurrences in Ultimate Member
A CSRF vulnerability in a logged-in user's profile edit form in the Ultimate Member plugin before 2.0.40 for WordPress allows attackers to become admin and subsequently extract sensitive information and execute arbitrary code. This occurs because the attacker can change the e-mail address in the administrator profile, and then the attacker is able to reset the administrator password using the WordPress "password forget" form. (2019-04-03, CVE-2019-10673)
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.