The Newsletters WordPress plugin before 4.15 does not prevent deserialization of untrusted input that is stored through a public form, allowing unauthenticated attackers to inject a PHP object and, via a property-oriented gadget chain bundled with the Newsletters WordPress plugin before 4.15, write arbitrary files and execute code on the server.
Weakness
The product deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently ensuring that the resulting data will be valid.
Potential Mitigations
- Make fields transient to protect them from deserialization.
- An attempt to serialize and then deserialize a class containing transient fields will result in NULLs where the transient data should be. This is an excellent way to prevent time, environment-based, or sensitive variables from being carried over and used improperly.