On March 13th, a SQL injection script was found in the WP Statistics plugin. WP Statistic is an open source plugin design to track visitors. It records IP addresses, referring sites, search engine terms, and location statistics. Per it’s WordPress.org, the plugin has over 600,000 installs. The Daily Swig reported that the plugin can break a WordPress site’s encryption keys and salts. Hackers can use automated tools like sqlmap. The flaw was found in admins accessing the “Pages” option to get statistics. This sends a request to a database and generates an SQL query. This function is normally reserved for administrators. But the flaw can be viewed by non-admins. The hacker can then input their own values into the database.
When the creators were alerted to the flaw, they quickly sanitized the bug and released a new patch.