Mediaboss Marketing

Recently released security updates for the popular Joomla content management system (CMS) address a SQL injection vulnerability that poses a high risk and can be exploited to extract information from the databases of Joomla-based sites.

The Joomla Project released versions 3.2.3 and 2.5.19 of the open-source CMS Thursday. Both updates address two cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in core components, but version 3.2.3 also patches a SQL injection flaw, publicly disclosed in early February, and an unauthorized log-in flaw in the Gmail-based authentication plug-in.

The Joomla advisory for the SQL injection vulnerability is lacking technical details. It only notes that the flaw, whose severity is rated as high, stems from inadequate escaping and affects Joomla CMS versions 3.1.0 through 3.2.2.

However, security researchers from Web security firm Sucuri have linked the patch to a zero-day exploit that was published on the Internet on Feb. 6 and targets the weblinks-categories id parameter.

I actually had one of our developers investigate [the patched vulnerability] for us and the flaw is the same one that was publicly released a month ago on exploit-db [an exploit listing website], said Daniel Cid, Sucuris CTO, Monday via email. What really shocked us is that Joomla took almost a month to release a patch for it.

The Joomla Project did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires the affected site to use the Similar Tags module, researchers from vulnerability intelligence firm Secunia said in a security advisory. According to the official Joomla documentation, Similar Tags is one of the modules shipped by default with the CMS.

SQL injection is one of the most common types of flaws exploited by attackers to compromise websites. Depending on their specific technical details, these vulnerabilities allow attackers to inject rogue code into sites or steal sensitive data from their databases.

The SQL injection vulnerability recently patched by Joomla does not appear to allow code injection, just the manipulation of SELECT calls to extract information from the database, including user names and password hashes, Cid said.

This might explain why widespread attacks targeting the flaw have not been reported so far, even though an exploit for it has been available for over a month.

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Joomla receives patches for zero-day SQL injection vulnerability, other flaws