Zero-day Stored XSS Vulnerability Allowed Attackers to Compromise 70,000 Websites

Researchers found out that "Social Warfare", a social sharing plug-in powered by Warfare Plugins is infected with a critical Stored XSS Zero-day flaw which allows cybercriminals to place malicious scripts and conquer the assailable WordPress websites.

'Social Warfare' is a social sharing plugin which is essentially used to accumulate more website traffic by receiving more social shares for website developers.

Amidst some of the plugins debugging features, the plug-in carries an exploitable code which assists the payload in being stored in the website's database and reclaimed with every page request.

Referencing from Sucuri research, “These features aren’t directly used anywhere and rely on various $_GET parameters to be executed, which makes it easy to see if your site was attacked using this vulnerability."

The exploit which was rampantly distributed across the globe is a critical flaw that has allowed hackers to entirely gain control of the ill-protected websites in the sphere.

As the abuse of the exploit continued, multiple ongoing attempts from over a hundred distinct IPs were noticed by the analysts.

Reportedly, around 70,000 websites have the plugin installed and the attacks are likely to multiply if the flaw is left unpatched. Meanwhile, users are advised by the experts to get an update to version 3.5.3.

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