From simple recon to PWN wordpress admin panel writeup

rood
3 min readOct 13, 2024

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Hello Guy’s, I’m rood bug bounty hunter and this first English writeup for me

In this writeup I will write about one of Interesting findings I discovered recently that’s allowed me to register new account with admin privilege’s in WordPress panel

So firstly when I do some recon if I finish simple recon like sd enum & google dorking I prefer to find subsidiaries and my favorite method to find this assets is copyright recon

For example: I’m go to google and search like this: “© 2024 Uber Technologies Inc.”

and do some filtration like -uber.com or search for old copyrights like “© 2023 Uber Technologies Inc.” , or © 2022 Uber Technologies Inc. etc…

So I found old website with old version of WordPress and it’s allowed registration

Wappalyzer results

So I register account to start test and first thing I try to test it is edit profile

POST request for profile editing

So there’s something Interesting in parameters before any value there’s 2 words (_UM_) so I copy one of this parameters and do some googling, I found this result

Now I understand they use ultimatemember WordPress plugin

What’s ultimatemember?

Ultimate Member is a free user profile plugin that makes it easy to create powerful online communities and membership sites with WordPress.

So first thing I search about it, is CVE for this plugin

I found CVE-2023–3460 for this plugin and yeah I’m sure it’s vulnerable because the WP version is old and there’s clear steps to exploit this CVE

Steps to exploit CVE-2023–3460

The exploit is so easy, when you register add this parameter in POST request for registration (wp_càpabilities[administrator]=1)

So I register another new account and add this parameter

And yeah after forwared request it’s redirect me to admin panel directly

Admin panel pwned

So that’s it I know the exploit is very easy but the game is how you can search about everything and analyze it to achive the hard things, I wish everything was so clear and i’m sorry for my weak language please don’t forget to support me with like and clapping

Thanks for reading, love u all ❤

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