SSRF APR 2023: 18 Server-Side Request Forgery APR 2023

What is Server-Side Request Forgery APR 2023?

Server-Side request forgery (also known as SSRF) occur whenever a WordPress or WooCommerce is fetching a remote resource without validating the user-supplied URL. It allows an attacker to coerce the public side (front-end) to send a crafted request to an unexpected destination (back-end, database, files), even when protected by a firewall, or another type of network access control list (ACL).

As modern websites provide end-users with convenient features, fetching an URL becomes a common tactic. As a result, the incidence of SSRF 2023 is increasing. Also, the severity of SSRF 2023 is growing higher due to publicly accessible cloud services and the complexity of their architectures.

What is the impact of a SSRF APR 2023 attack?

A successful SSRF 2023 attack can often result in unauthorized actions on the hosting environment or access to data within WordPress and WooCommerce, or on other back-end systems that the application can communicate with like database or 3rd party integrations (payment modules, seo modules, marketing modules, analytics modules, etc). In some situations, the SSRF vulnerability might allow an attacker to perform arbitrary command execution, compromising everything.

A specific and successful SSRF 2023 exploit that causes connections to external systems, always generates malicious direct attacks, that appear to originate from the domain itself or hosting environment, continuing its attack towards the next vulnerable external system.