Description

Hackers are exploiting an already patched WooCommerce Payments plugin vulnerability, CVE-2023-28121, to obtain access as a privileged user, including administrators, on a vulnerable WordPress installation. WooCommerce Payments is a well-known plugin that allows sites to take debit and credit cards as payment in WooCommerce stores, with over 600,000 active installs. Attackers merely need to include the 'X-WCPAY-PLATFORM-CHECKOUT-USER' request header and set its value to the user ID of the account they want to impersonate, and when WooCommerce Payments notices this header, it treats it as a request from the specified user ID and processes it with all of the user's privileges. RCE Security published a proof-of-concept for the problem that explains how to create new admin accounts on vulnerable WordPress sites. The exploitation of vulnerability CVE-2023-28121 began on July 14, 2023, and continued throughout the weekend, when the exploit threat actor installed the WP Console plugin or created administrator accounts on the affected device. Following that, it executes PHP code that installs a file uploader on the server, which is subsequently utilized as a backdoor even after the vulnerability has been addressed. Furthermore, threat actors searched and attempted to access the '/wp-content/plugins/woocommerce-payments/readme[.]txt' file to identify vulnerable WordPress sites. In the case of its existence, they exploited the flaw. Additionally, threat actors used seven IP addresses in their attacks and scanned 213212 sites.