Tag: plugins

On May 5, Patchstack published a security advisory about a high severity reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in ACF (Advanced Custom Fields), potentially affecting more than 4.5 million users. WP Engine patched the vulnerability on May 4, but the Akamai Security Intelligence Group (SIG)  is reporting that attackers began attempting to exploit it within 24 hours of Patchstack’s publication.

“Once exploit vector details are publicly released, scanning and exploitation attempts rapidly increase,” Akamai Principal Security Researcher Ryan Barnett said. “It is common for security researchers, hobbyists, and companies searching for their risk profile to examine new vulnerabilities upon release. However, the volume is increasing, and the amount of time between release and said growth is drastically decreasing. The Akamai SIG analyzed XSS attack data and identified attacks starting within 24 hours of the exploit PoC being made public.

“What is particularly interesting about this is the query itself: The threat actor copied and used the Patchstack sample code from the write-up.“

Patchstack’s security advisory includes a breakdown of the vulnerability, sample payload, and details of the patch.

Although the vulnerability, assigned CVE-2023-30777, was promptly patched, and WP Engine alerted its users the same day, site owners have been slow to update to the latest, patched version of the plugin (6.1.6). Only 31.5% of the plugin’s user base are running version 6.1+, leaving a significant portion still vulnerable unless they are protected by additional security measures like virtual patches.

“Exploitation of this leads to a reflected XSS attack in which a threat actor can inject malicious scripts, redirects, ads, and other forms of URL manipulation into a victim site,” Barnett said. “This would, in turn, push those illegitimate scripts to visitors of that affected site. This manipulation is essentially blind to the site owner, making these threats even more dangerous.”

Barnett noted that attackers using the sample code from Patchstack indicates these are not sophisticated attempts, but the comprehensive security advisory makes vulnerable sites easy to target.

“This highlights that the response time for attackers is rapidly decreasing, increasing the need for vigorous and prompt patch management,” Barnett said.

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WP Engine has launched an annual survey for Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), one of the plugins it acquired from Delicious Brains in 2022. ACF reports more than 4.5 million active users, including PRO site installs, and WP Engine Product Manager Iain Poulson reports that the plugin is “growing in every way since the acquisition.” ACF has added more users, features, and releases, along with community building efforts like bi-weekly office hours.

This is the first time ACF has surveyed its user base about how they are building sites with WordPress and what can be improved. The survey starts with questions about the contexts in which professionals are using ACF and the volume and types of sites they are building. Respondents are asked about how they edit their sites, the type of license they are using, how often the reach for ACF in their toolbox, and which ACF features they use most often (i.e. REST API, ACF Blocks, Options pages, ACF Forms, Post Types Registration, etc.).

The survey is on the lengthier side with an estimated 15 minutes to complete. As ACF is a critical and indispensable part of many WordPress developers’ workflow, helping to shape its future development may be worth the time. WP Engine has also added a few questions that may only be tangentially related to ACF, such as where users are hosting their WordPress sites and what they use for local development.

“It’s our primary method for gathering insights and feedback from the WP community on what they would like to see in ACF,” WP Engine Product Marketing Manager Rob Stinson said. He also related the importance of previous customer feedback that helped ACF’s team plan and implement features like registering CPTs and Taxonomies (v6.1).

“In the near term, we’re working on bringing a UI to register Options Pages which is a PRO plugin feature, some long requested features like bi-directional relationship fields and improvements to conditional logic rules for taxonomy fields,” Poulson said. “We will also be focussing a release on more ACF Blocks features and improvements. The survey won’t likely change those planned features, and the initial results are validating our planned work on ACF Blocks.”

The survey ends May 19, 2023, and WP Engine plans to publish an aggregated and anonymized version of the results soon after the data is collected.

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