Another vulnerability was discovered in the LiteSpeed Cache WordPress plugin—an Unauthenticated Privilege Escalation that could lead to a total site takeover. Unfortunately, updating to the latest version of the plugin may not be enough to resolve the issue.
LiteSpeed Cache Plugin
The LiteSpeed Cache Plugin is a website performance optimization plugin that has over 6 million installations. A cache plugin stores a static copy of the data used to create a web page so that the server doesn’t have to repeatedly fetch the exact same page elements from the database every time a browser requests a web page.
Storing the page in a “cache” reduced the server load and speeds up the time it takes to deliver a web page to a browser or a crawler.
LiteSpeed Cache also does other page speed optimizations like compressing CSS and JavaScript files (minifying), puts the most important CSS for rendering a page in the HTML code itself (inlined CSS) and other optimizations that together make a site faster.
Unauthenticated Privilege Escalation
An unauthenticated privilege escalation is a type of vulnerability that allows a hacker to attain site access privileges without having to sign in as a user. This makes it easier to hack a site in comparison to an authenticated vulnerability that requires a hacker to first attain a certain privilege level before being able to execute the attack.
Unauthenticated privilege escalation typically occurs because of a flaw in a plugin (or theme) and in this case it’s a data leak.
Patchstack, the security company that discovered the vulnerability writes that vulnerability can only be exploited under two conditions:
“Active debug log feature on the LiteSpeed Cache plugin.
Has activated the debug log feature once before (not currently active now) and the /wp-content/debug.log file is not purged or removed.”
Discovered By Patchstack
The vulnerability was discovered by researchers at Patchstack WordPress security company, which offers a free vulnerability warning service and advanced protection for as little as $5/month.