A vulnerability was discovered in the popular Stop Spammers Security | Block Spam Users, Comments, Forms WordPress plugin.
The purpose of the plugin is to stop spam in comments, forms, and sign-up registrations. It can stop spam bots and has the ability for users to input IP addresses to block.
It is a required practice for any WordPress plugin or form that accepts a user input to only allow specific inputs, like text, images, email addresses, whatever input is expected.
Unexpected inputs should be filtered out. That filtering process that keeps out unwanted inputs is called sanitization.
For example, a contact form should have a function that inspects what is submitted and block (sanitize) anything that is not text.
The vulnerability discovered in the anti-spam plugin allowed encoded input (base64 encoded) which can then trigger a type of vulnerability called a PHP Object injection vulnerability.
The description of the vulnerability published on the WPScan website describes the issue as:
“The plugin passes base64 encoded user input to the unserialize() PHP function when CAPTCHA are used as second challenge, which could lead to PHP Object injection if a plugin installed on the blog has a suitable gadget chain…”
The classification of the vulnerability is Insecure Deserialization.
The non-profit Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) describes the potential impact of these kinds of vulnerabilities as serious, which may or may not be the case specific to this vulnerability.
Source and more details: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-anti-spam-plugin-vulnerability-affects-up-to-60000-sites