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The plugin, installed on hundreds of thousands of sites, allows anyone to filch database info without having to be logged in. 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. The specific vulnerability is a time-based blind SQL injection, according to researchers at Wordfence. This technique involves sending requests to the database that “guess” at the content of a database table and instruct the database to delay the response or “sleep” if that guess is correct. For instance, an attacker could ask the database if the first letter of the admin user’s email address starts with the letter “A,” and instruct it to delay the response by five seconds if this is true. The only reliable method of preventing SQL injection is to prepare all SQL statements before executing them, researchers added. Prepared statements isolate each query parameter so that an adversary would not be able to see the entire scope of the data that’s returned. VeronaLabs, the plugin’s developer, has released a patch with version 13.0.8, so site administrators should update as quickly as possible. A similar bug was found earlier in May, which impacted the “Spam protection, AntiSpam, FireWall by CleanTalk” plugin, which is installed on more than 100,000 sites. It too allowed adversaries to use the time-based bling SQL approach, also without having to be logged on to mount an attack. Via threatpost.com

The “People Nearby” feature in the secure messaging app can be abused to unmask a user’s precise location, a researcher said. A feature that allows Telegram users to see who’s nearby can be misused to pinpoint your exact distance to other users – by spoofing one’s latitude and longitude. According to bug-hunter Ahmed Hassan, the “People Nearby” feature could allow an attacker to triangulate the location of unsuspecting Telegram users. The feature is disabled by default, but as Hassan pointed out, “Users who enable this feature are not aware they are basically publishing their precise location.” The feature lists exactly how far people are from one’s location (1.3 miles and so on). This isn’t an issue as long as that number remains a radius. But it’s possible to spoof one’s location for three different points, and then use the resulting three distances to precisely pinpoint where a target is, the researcher found. To spoof a GPS location, an adversary has various options, but the easiest method, Hassan noted in a Monday blog, is to “just walk around the area, collect the GPS latitude and longitude of yourself, and how far the target person is from you (super easy).” Another option is to use a GPS-spoofing app. Armed with the three locations, an attacker can then open Google Earth Pro, plug in the spoofed locations, and use a ruler to find the middle point between the three. For Telegram’s part, the company said it doesn’t regard the issue as a bug, and declined Hassan’s security report. Telegram did not immediately return a request for comment. Via threatpost.com