On 15th July 2021, a critical SQL-injection security vulnerability in the WooCommerce e-commerce platform and a related plugin was reported which might affect millions of websites around the world. The vulnerabilities were detected on the 13th of July and fixed in WooCommerce versions 3.3.6 to 5.5.1 and WooCommerce Blocks versions 2.5.16 to 5.5.1. Though they pushed a forced automatic update to all affected websites, it is recommended to manually check your website and make sure that everything is up to date.
What is the exploit impact? As per the announcement from WooCommerce, this vulnerability allows an unauthenticated attacker to access arbitrary data in an online store’s database. If a store was affected, the exposed information will be specific to what that site is storing but could include order, customer, and administrative information
So what is an SQL Injection attack and how to prevent it? SQL injection is a web security vulnerability that allows an attacker to interfere with the SQL queries that an application makes to its database. This type of vulnerability allows a malicious hacker to affect the database in a way that makes it display information or behave differently in ways it’s not supposed to. This is a common attack vector and can be mostly detected using some website auditing tools. The developer of every application must do proper validation of the user input through any form or from the URI and filter them properly.
Can cPGuard protect your website from such vulnerabilities? Yes, the cPGuard WAF is powered by Malware.Expert ModSec rules set can protect your websites from such generic attacks including SQL injection. So cPGuard can already defend against such attacks and protect your websites. It also works along with the IPDB Distributed Firewall module which can detect and block the repeated attacking IPs on all our customer servers.
