Website administrators WordPress who use the Ultimate Member plugin are urged to update it to the latest version to block attacks that attempt to exploit multiple critical and easily exploitable vulnerabilities that could lead to hacking of these sites.
Ultimate Member is a plugin for the WordPress platform with more than 100.000 active installations and is designed to facilitate the work of the profile and the management of members.
This plugin provides support for creating websites that allow easy registration and creation of online communities, with custom privileges for various user roles.
In a report published today from Wordfence's Threat Intelligence team, threat analyst Chloe Chamberland said the three security flaws revealed by Wordfence could allow attackers to become an administrator and take over any WordPress site using a vulnerable installation of the Ultimate Member.
Following the revelation of the vulnerabilities, the plugin development team repaired it with the release of Ultimate Member 2.1.12 on October 29th.
One of them is considered by Wordfence to be "very critical", as it "allows initially unauthorized users to easily scale their privileges to those of an administrator".
“Once an attacker has admin access to a WordPress site, they have effectively taken over the entire site and can perform anything from taking the site offline to further contamination of the website with malware,” Chamberland explained.
Two of the bugs received a maximum CVSS Severity Score of 10/10, as WPO can be infiltrated by an unrelated unregistered malicious user
The third was rated 9,8 / 10, as it requires access to wp-admin and the site's profile.php page, but is still considered critical as it allows any authenticated attacker to gain administrator privileges with very little effort.
Although Ultimate Member 2.1.12, the version that fixes the three vulnerabilities, was released on October 26, the new version has been installed approximately 75.000 times. This means that at least 25.000 WordPress sites with active Ultimate Member installations remain potentially exposed to attacks.
Ultimate Member users are kindly requested to update the add-on on 2.1.12 as soon as possible.