WordPress admins should rush to update their websites at the earliest if they are using Elementor. It turns out that Elementor plugin for WordPress had some serious XSS vulnerabilities allowing logged in users to execute malicious code.
XSS Vulnerability In Elementor WordPress Plugin
Team Wordfence has now shared their findings of cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in the Elementor WordPress plugin.
As elaborated in their post, the plugin lacked server-side validation of HTML tags. Thus, it became possible for anyone logged in to the site to exploit the editor and execute malicious codes.
Many of these elements offer the option to set an HTML tag for the content within… Unfortunately, for six of these elements, the HTML tags were not validated on the server side, so it was possible for any user able to access the Elementor editor, including contributors, to use this option to add executable JavaScript to a post or page via a crafted request.
For instance, if the adversary with contributor access to a site added a malicious code to any post via the Elementor, the code would then execute at the site editor’s or reviewer’s end in the browser.
Whereas, if an admin reviewed a post with malicious code, the code would execute at the site-level. This would, in turn, lead to a website takeover as well.
As for the vulnerable elements, the researchers mentioned the Column element, Icon Box, Image Box Accordion, Heading, and Divider elements.
Patch Deployed
Wordfence spotted the vulnerabilities in the Elementor plugin earlier this year after which, they reported the matter to the developers.
Consequently, the developers fixed the bugs with plugin version 3.1.2. Nonetheless, they further deployed additional fixes for the flaws with plugin version 3.1.4.
Elementor plugin currently boasts over 7 million active downloads. It means the vulnerabilities risked millions of websites globally. Also, the researchers have explained that the bugs affected both Elementor Pro as well as the free versions. In response to a users’ query, they explained,
The vulnerabilities we found were present in the Free version of Elementor, which needs to be installed in order for Elementor Pro to function. That is, if you have Elementor Pro installed, you should still make sure to keep the underlying Elementor installation up to date.
All WordPress users running this plugin should update their sites with Elementor plugin version 3.1.4.
