Quote:WP Statistics, a plugin installed on more than 600,000 WordPress websites, has an SQL-injection security vulnerability that could let site visitors make off with all kinds of sensitive information from web databases, including emails, credit-card data, passwords and more.
 
WP Statistics, as its name suggests, is a plugin that delivers analytics for site owners, including how many people visit the site, where they’re coming from, what browsers and search engines they use, and which pages, categories and tags have the most visits. It also delivers anonymized data around IP addresses, referring sites, and country- and city-level details for visitors, all presented in the form of charts and graphs.
 
Wordfence researchers found the high-severity bug (tracked as CVE-2021-24340, rating 7.5 out of 10 on the CVSS scale) in the “Pages” function, which lets administrators see which pages have received the most traffic. It returns this data using SQL queries to a back-end database – but it turns out that unauthenticated attackers can hijack the function to perform their own queries, in order to purloin sensitive information.
 
“While the ‘Pages’ page was intended for administrators only and would not display information to non-admin users, it was possible to start loading this page’s constructor by sending a request to wp-admin/admin.php with the page parameter set to wps_pages_page,” said Wordfence researchers in a posting this week. “Since the SQL query ran in the constructor for the ‘Pages’ page, this meant that any site visitor, even those without a login, could cause this SQL query to run. A malicious actor could then supply malicious values for the ID or type parameters.”