Patches were issued in order to fix a serious security flaw in UpdraftPlus. This plugin is used by over 3 million WordPress users. It can then be exploited to obtain the private data of the affected sites using an account at the compromised websites.
“All UpdraftPlus versions from March 2019 and onwards contain a vulnerability due to a missing permissions level check, which allows untrusted users to access backups,” said the plugin’s maintainers in an advisory this week.
Security researcher Marc-Alexandre Montpas of Automattic has been credited with discovering and reporting the vulnerability on February 14 that’s been assigned the identifier CVE-2022-0633 (CVSS score: 8.5). The issue impacts UpdraftPlus versions from 1.16. 7 to 1.22.2.
UpdraftPlus is a backup and restoration solution that’s capable of performing full, manual, or scheduled backups of WordPress files, databases, plugins and themes, which can then be reinstated via the WordPress admin dashboard.
A consequence of this defect is that it allows any logged-in user on a WordPress installation with UpdraftPlus installed to exercise the privilege of downloading an existing backup – permissions which should have been reserved for administrative users only.
Beyond leaking passwords and other confidential data, it could also “in some cases site takeover if the attacker is able to obtain database credentials from a configuration file and successfully access the site database,” WordPress security company Wordfence said.
Users of the UpdraftPlus plugin are recommended to update to version 1.22. 3 (or 2.22. 3 for the Premium version) to mitigate any potential exploitation. The latest version available as of February 17 is 1.22. 4, which addresses bugs related to printing auto-backup options on PHP 8.
