Blackhole for Bad Bots: A security weakness
Blackhole for Bad Bots is affected by a security weakness. Exposure depends on how the affected operation is made reachable by the site. The resulting impact depends on how the affected component exposes the vulnerable operation.
- Component
- Blackhole for Bad Bots
- Plugin slug
blackhole-for-bad-bots- Affected
- See vendor advisory
- Safe version
- See mitigation notes
- Published
- Apr 04, 2022
This CVE was published Apr 04, 2022 and is one of 1 known issue for this plugin.
Update, patch or deactivate.
Update Blackhole for Bad Bots to a release outside the affected range, or disable and remove it until a fixed version is available.
No confirmed safe version is listed. Consider a vendor-supported patch or temporarily restricting the affected functionality while you assess the risk.
Deactivate only when warranted by your risk profile, or when advised by your hosting provider in the limited circumstances where the vulnerability cannot otherwise be mitigated. If you’re unsure which action is appropriate, contact Fused or your hosting provider for guidance.
Technical description
The Blackhole for Bad Bots WordPress plugin before 3.3.2 uses headers such as CF-CONNECTING-IP, CLIENT-IP etc to determine the IP address of requests hitting the blackhole URL, which allows them to be spoofed. This could result in blocking arbitrary IP addresses, such as legitimate/good search engine crawlers / bots. This could also be abused by competitors to cause damage related to visibility in search engines, can be used to bypass arbitrary blocks caused by this plugin, block any visitor or even the administrator and even more.
NVD vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:H