Description

The Social Web Suite WordPress plugin through 4.1.12 does not require its shared secret to be set before accepting requests authorised by it, and does not sanitise and escape a parameter before using it in an SQL statement, allowing unauthenticated users to perform SQL injection attacks.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "8.6",
  "pubDate": "2026-10-11T07:17:27.603Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-10-11T07:17:27.603Z",
  "executiveSummary": "The Social Web Suite WordPress plugin, in versions up to and including 4.1.12, is susceptible to an unauthenticated SQL injection vulnerability.\nThe flaw stems from improper input handling and a failure to enforce the requirement of a shared secret during the request authentication phase.\nThis vulnerability allows remote, unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary SQL commands against the WordPress database, leading to potential unauthorized data exfiltration, modification, or destruction.\nThe risk is critical as it bypasses standard authentication mechanisms, granting an attacker direct interaction with the backend database. Systems running the affected plugin versions are exposed to full compromise of the database layer, which may subsequently lead to total site takeover, administrative account enumeration, or the execution of malicious administrative operations. The lack of validation on user-supplied parameters before database query execution represents a significant security oversight in the plugin's architectural design.",
  "technicalDetails": "The vulnerability is primarily rooted in an insecure authentication bypass and subsequent lack of input sanitization within the Social Web Suite plugin. The plugin fails to verify the presence or validity of a configured shared secret before processing incoming requests, effectively negating the intended security boundary for administrative operations.\nWhen a request is submitted to the vulnerable endpoint, the plugin proceeds to process parameters without verifying if the requesting entity possesses the necessary authorization. A specific parameter is passed directly into a database query without being properly sanitized or escaped. This failure to use parameterized queries or appropriate database abstraction layer functions (such as $wpdb->prepare()) allows the injection of arbitrary SQL syntax.\nThe attack flow proceeds as follows: 1) The attacker identifies the vulnerable endpoint handled by the Social Web Suite plugin. 2) The attacker crafts a malicious HTTP request containing a crafted SQL payload within the unsanitized parameter. 3) Because the plugin does not enforce the shared secret verification, the request is accepted by the application logic. 4) The application passes the malicious parameter into a SQL statement, which is then executed by the database engine. 5) The database executes the injected commands, which can range from simple boolean-based blind injection to extract data, to UNION-based injection to retrieve information from other tables, or even stacked queries depending on the database configuration and driver support.\nThe lack of authentication requirements means this vulnerability is exploitable over the network by any unauthenticated remote attacker. The post-exploitation impact is severe, as the attacker gains the ability to interact directly with the database. This allows for the dumping of sensitive user data, including hashed passwords, session tokens, or sensitive business information. Furthermore, an attacker might leverage the SQL injection to modify existing user records, elevate their own privileges to an administrative role, or delete data, resulting in a total loss of confidentiality, integrity, and availability for the WordPress instance."
}