Disclosure: WordPress WPDB SQL Injection - Technical

Today, a significant SQL-Injection vulnerability was fixed in WordPress 4.8.3. Before reading further, if you haven’t updated yet stop right now and update.

The foundations of this vulnerability was reported via Hacker-One on September 20th, 2017.

This post will detail the technical vulnerability as well as how to mitigate it. There is another post which deals with the background and time-lines.

Disclosure: WordPress WPDB SQL Injection - Background

Today, a significant SQL-Injection vulnerability was fixed in WordPress 4.8.3. Before reading further, if you haven’t updated yet stop right now and update.

The foundations of this vulnerability was reported via Hacker-One on September 20th, 2017.

This post will detail the background on the vulnerability as well as why I publicly threatened to Fully Disclose. There is another post which deals with the technical vulnerability.

Disclosure: WordPress WPDB SQL Injection Vulnerability

At the current point in time there exists a very significant SQL Injection vulnerability in the WordPress code base. I want to make it abundantly clear that this does not affect anyone using WordPress “off the shelf”. It only is exploitable if you use certain WordPress code outside of a WordPress install. So this is not a very “attackable” vulnerability. Or to put it in other terms, this is a high level vulnerability which has a very low threat level. It is also worth noting that it has not been fixed by WordPress (even 90 days after disclosure).