Description

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in DevItems HashBar – WordPress Notification Bar allows Cross Site Request Forgery. This issue affects HashBar – WordPress Notification Bar: from n/a through 2.0.0.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "8.8",
  "pubDate": "2026-08-18T22:17:25.173Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-08-18T22:17:25.173Z",
  "executiveSummary": "A Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability has been identified in the DevItems HashBar – WordPress Notification Bar plugin. This security flaw allows malicious actors to induce authenticated administrative or privileged users into executing unwanted, state-changing actions without their explicit consent.\nThe vulnerability directly impacts the HashBar – WordPress Notification Bar product across versions ranging from n/a through 2.0.0. Successful exploitation of this flaw can compromise the integrity of the affected WordPress site by allowing unauthorized modification of notification bar configurations, potentially leading to persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) or defacement if injected payloads are rendered on the front end.\nThe risk implications are moderate to high depending on the administrative privileges of the targeted user interacting with the malicious payload. The attacker capabilities rely on social engineering, typically requiring an authenticated administrator to visit a malicious third-party website or click a crafted link containing forged requests directed at the vulnerable WordPress instance. Because no direct execution capabilities are granted to unauthenticated entities inherently, the attack strictly hinges on leveraging the trust relationship between the victim browser and the target web application.",
  "technicalDetails": "The root cause of this vulnerability stems from the absence or improper implementation of anti-CSRF tokens, such as cryptographic nonces, within the administrative form submissions and state-changing request handlers of the HashBar – WordPress Notification Bar plugin. Web applications that fail to validate request origins or session-unique tokens for sensitive operations leave their endpoints exposed to forged cross-origin requests.\nThe vulnerable component comprises the backend request handling routines responsible for processing configuration updates, settings modifications, and administrative parameters within the affected versions (n/a through 2.0.0). Because these handlers process incoming HTTP requests without verifying whether the request was intentionally generated by the legitimate user interface, an external context can successfully issue authorized commands.\nThe attack flow proceeds as follows: First, an attacker crafts a malicious HTML page or script containing an automatic submission vector, such as a hidden HTML form or an asynchronous JavaScript (AJAX) request, pre-populated with specific parameter changes targeting the administrative endpoints of the vulnerable WordPress site. Second, the attacker induces an authenticated administrator of the target WordPress installation to browse the malicious resource or view a compromised page. Third, the victim's browser automatically includes any valid, active session cookies associated with the target WordPress site in the outgoing cross-origin request. Fourth, the server-side application receives the request, associates it with the victim's active administrative session, processes the unverified parameters, and applies the unauthorized modifications to the HashBar configuration.\nNetwork exposure is HTTP-based, requiring the target administrative user to be reachable over the network and actively authenticated to the WordPress dashboard. Privilege requirements are effectively bypassed through the browser context of the victim; while the attacker operates with zero privileges, the forged request inherits the high privileges of the targeted administrator. The post-exploitation impact includes unauthorized alteration of notification bars, potential injection of malicious scripts into the rendered DOM if input sanitization is absent, and general administrative state manipulation."
}