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Path Traversal occurrences in Wordpress File Upload
The WordPress File Upload Free and Pro WordPress plugins before 4.16.3 allow users with a role as low as Contributor to perform path traversal via a shortcode argument, which can then be used to upload a PHP code disguised as an image inside the auto-loaded directory of the plugin, resulting in arbitrary code execution. (2022-03-28, CVE-2021-24962)
An issue was discovered in the File Upload plugin before 4.13.0 for WordPress. A directory traversal can lead to remote code execution by uploading a crafted txt file into the lib directory, because of a wfu_include_lib call. (2020-03-13, CVE-2020-10564)
Why Path Traversal can be dangerous
Relative Path Confusion means that your web server is configured to serve responses to ambiguous URLs. This configuration can possibly cause confusion about the correct relative path for the URL. It is also an issue of resources, such as images, styles etc., which are specified in the response using relative path, not the absolute URL.
If the web browser permits to parse "cross-content" response, the attacker may be able to fool the web browser into interpreting HTML into other content types, which can then lead to a cross site scripting attack (link do XSS).