Security News > 2021 > February > Critical vulnerability fixed in WordPress plugin with 800K installs
NextGen Gallery, a WordPress plugin used for creating image galleries, currently has over 800,000 active installs, making this security update a top priority for all site owners that have it installed.
Both of them are Cross-Site Request Forgery bugs which, in the case of the critical vulnerability tracked as CVE-2020-35942, can lead to Reflected Cross-Site Scripting and remote code execution attacks via file upload or Local File Inclusion.
Attackers can exploit these security flaws by tricking WordPress admins into clicking specially crafted links or attachments to execute malicious code in their browsers.
Luckily, "[t]his attack would likely require some degree of social engineering, as an attacker would have to trick an administrator into clicking a link that submitted crafted requests to perform these actions," Wordfence threat analyst Ram Gall said.
While NextGEN Gallery was released in December, it only has just over 266,000 new downloads until yesterday according to raw download stats for the WordPress plugin's repository, including both updates and new installs.
This translates into more than 530,000 WordPress sites with active NextGEN Gallery installations potentially exposed to takeover attacks if attackers start exploiting the two bugs.
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Related Vulnerability
| DATE | CVE | VULNERABILITY TITLE | RISK |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-02-09 | CVE-2020-35942 | Cross-site Scripting vulnerability in Imagely Nextgen Gallery A Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) issue in the NextGEN Gallery plugin before 3.5.0 for WordPress allows File Upload and Local File Inclusion via settings modification, leading to Remote Code Execution and XSS. | 8.8 |