Joomla development team has released the Joomla 3.8.4 that addresses many issues, including an SQL injection bug and three cross-site scripting (XSS) flaws.

Joomla development team has released the Joomla 3.8.4 that addresses a large number of issues, including an SQL injection bug and three cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities. The latest release also includes several improvements.

The XSS and SQL injection vulnerabilities have been classified as “low priority”

“Joomla 3.8.4 is now available. This is a security release for the 3.x series of Joomla addressing four security vulnerabilities and including over 100 bug fixes and improvements.” reads the announcement.

The most severe issue is the SQL injection vulnerability tracked as CVE-2018-6376 due to its high impact.

The issue was reported by the researcher Karim Ouerghemmi from RIPS Technologies (ripstech.com), it affects Joomla! CMS versions 3.7.0 through 3.8.3.

“The lack of type casting of a variable in SQL statement leads to a SQL injection vulnerability in the Hathor postinstall message.” states the security advisory published by Joomla.

“Recent updates to our analysis engine lead to the discovery of a new vulnerability in the Joomla! core affecting versions prior to 3.8.4. RIPS discovered a second-order SQL injection that could be used by attackers to leverage lower permissions and to escalate them into full admin permissions.” reads the analysis published by RIPS.

The experts explained that the flaw could be exploited to gain admin privileges and take over the Joomla installs.

“An attacker exploiting this vulnerability can read arbitrary data from the database. This data can be used to further extend the permissions of the attacker. By gaining full administrative privileges she can take over the Joomla! installation by executing arbitrary PHP code.” continues the post.

The researchers discovered the vulnerability by using their static code analyzer, an attacker can first inject arbitrary content into the targeted install’s database and then create a specially crafted query to gain admin privileges.

The XSS flaws affect the Uri class (versions 1.5.0 through 3.8.3), the com_fields component (versions 3.7.0 through 3.8.3), and the Module chrome (versions 3.0.0 through 3.8.3).

According to the development team, the Uri class (formerly JUri) fails to properly filter the input opening to XSS attacks.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Joomla 3.8.4, SQL injection)

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