Vulnerabilities > CVE-2019-10270 - Weak Password Recovery Mechanism for Forgotten Password vulnerability in Ultimatemember Ultimate Member
Attack vector
NETWORK Attack complexity
LOW Privileges required
LOW Confidentiality impact
HIGH Integrity impact
HIGH Availability impact
HIGH Summary
An arbitrary password reset issue was discovered in the Ultimate Member plugin 2.39 for WordPress. It is possible (due to lack of verification and correlation between the reset password key sent by mail and the user_id parameter) to reset the password of another user. One only needs to know the user_id, which is publicly available. One just has to intercept the password modification request and modify user_id. It is possible to modify the passwords for any users or admin WordPress Ultimate Members. This could lead to account compromise and privilege escalation.
Vulnerable Configurations
Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)
Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)
- Password Recovery Exploitation An attacker may take advantage of the application feature to help users recover their forgotten passwords in order to gain access into the system with the same privileges as the original user. Generally password recovery schemes tend to be weak and insecure. Most of them use only one security question . For instance, mother's maiden name tends to be a fairly popular one. Unfortunately in many cases this information is not very hard to find, especially if the attacker knows the legitimate user. These generic security questions are also re-used across many applications, thus making them even more insecure. An attacker could for instance overhear a coworker talking to a bank representative at the work place and supplying their mother's maiden name for verification purposes. An attacker can then try to log in into one of the victim's accounts, click on "forgot password" and there is a good chance that the security question there will be to provide mother's maiden name. A weak password recovery scheme totally undermines the effectiveness of a strong password scheme.