WordPress SEO Security release

This morning we released an update to our WordPress SEO plugin (both free and premium) that fixes a security issue. A bit more details follow below, but the short version of this post is simple: update. Now. Although you might find your WordPress install has already updated for you.

What did we fix?

We fixed a CSRF issue that allowed blind SQL injection. The one sentence explanation for the not so technical: by having a logged-in author, editor or admin visit a malformed URL a malicious hacker could change your database. While this does not allow mass hacking of installs using this hole, it does allow direct targeting of a user on a website. This is a serious issue, which is why we immediately set to work to fix it when we were notified of the issue.

Why we didn’t catch it? Well… Long story. It should have been caught in one of our regular security reviews. The values were escaped using esc_sql, which one would expect would prevent SQL injection. It does not. You’ll need far stricter sanitization. Not an excuse but it’s a good lesson to learn for other developers.

Responsible disclosure

We were notified of this issue by Ryan Dewhurst of the WPScan team, who waited for us to release an update before publishing his find to the public, for which we thank him! This type of responsible disclosure is what keeps us all safe, but it only does so if you update.

Forced automatic update

Because of the severity of the issue, the WordPress.org team put out a forced automatic update (thanks!). If you didn’t specifically disable those and you were:

• running on 1.7 or higher, you’ll have been auto-updated to 1.7.4.
• If you were running on 1.6.*, you’ll have been updated to 1.6.4.
• If you were running on 1.5.*, you’ll have been updated to 1.5.7.

If you are on an older version, we can’t auto-update you, but you should really update for tons of reasons. Of course you should really move to 1.7.4 as soon as you can anyway.

Note: If you’re using WordPress SEO Premium, you should immediately update to version 1.5.3. You can find the how-to in our knowledge base.