We would like to bring your attention to the following set of critical vulnerabilities that we have recently become aware of within the WordPress plugin ‘PHP Everywhere’.
Description
Three remote code execution vulnerabilities have been identified within the WordPress ‘PHP Everywhere’ plugin, affecting all versions of WordPress 2.0.3 and lower. Whilst these are all authenticated vulnerabilities, one of which, only requires a subscriber tier user account, which can be obtained through any present registration processes.
-
CVE-2022-24663 – Remote Code Execution flaw in which any subscriber can send a request containing shortcode set to:
[php_everywhere]<arbitrary PHP>[/php_everywhere]
via the parse-media-shortcode action triggering arbitrary code execution on the site.
-
CVE-2022-24664 – Remote Code Execution flaw in which any user with the edit_posts privilege, typically that of a contributor, can achieve code execution via the use of the PHP Everywhere Metabox.
-
CVE-2022-24665 – Remote Code Execution flaw in which any user with the edit_posts privilege, typically that of a contributor, can achieve code execution via the use of the PHP Everywhere Gutenberg block. However it should be noted that while it is possible to limit this feature to admin-only, it is not set by default.
The ‘PHP Everywhere’ plugin is believed to be installed on around one in a thousand WordPress instances.
Remediation
All of these flaws have been fully patched within the latest 3.0.0 patch of PHP Everywhere, which was released on January 10th 2022. Additionally, a WordFence firewall rule was also released on February 3rd 2022 to all free tier sites to help capture and prevent these attacks.
References
-
https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2022-24663
-
https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2022-24664
-
https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2022-24665
-
https://thehackernews.com/2022/02/critical-rce-flaws-in-php-everywhere.html
-
https://www.first.org/cvss/calculator/3.1#CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

Prime Day Scams – How Attackers Exploit Trust and Urgency
Every Prime Day, fake delivery texts flood inboxes, exploiting shoppers’ urgency and trust. We explain how these scams work and what both consumers and security teams…

Why So Syscalls? BOF Edition
Ibai Castells explains how moving from high level Windows APIs to lower level syscall usage alters what EDRs observe. It outlines the trade offs and gives…

Airport Chaos Shows How Fragile Our Infrastructure Really Is
Recent airport chaos revealed how fragile global infrastructure really is. A basic ransomware attack disrupted shared systems, grounding flights worldwide. The lesson is clear: outdated technology…