Websphere Application Server Cross-Site Request Forgery

IBM WebSphere Application Server 7.0, 8.0, 8.5, and 9.0 Admin Console is vulnerable to cross-site request forgery, caused by improper validation of user-supplied input. By persuading a user to visit a malicious URL, a remote attacker could send a specially-crafted request. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to perform CSRF attack and update available applications. IBM X-Force ID: 152992. (2018-12-12, CVE-2018-1926)

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.