A vulnerability and a security issue have been discovered in WordPress, which can be exploited by malicious people to disclose potentially sensitive information and conduct cross-site scripting attacks.

1) The security issue is caused due to WordPress using predictable cookies to identify the author of a comment. This can be exploited to view unmoderated comments by guessing and then faking the cookies sent to the original author.

Successful exploitation requires knowledge of the original author's name and email address.

2) Input passed via the URL through wp-admin/themes.php to wp-content/themes/default/functions.php is not properly sanitised before being returned to the user. This can be exploited to execute arbitrary HTML and script code in a user's browser session in context of an affected site.

Successful exploitation requires that the default theme is used, the victim is logged in as administrator and the user is running a browser that has not URL-encoded the request (e.g. Internet Explorer).

The security issue and the vulnerability are confirmed in version 2.2. Other versions may also be affected.

Solution
Do not post security sensitive information in comments. Edit the source code to ensure that unpredictable cookies are used and input is properly sanitised.

Provided and/or discovered by
1) Sumit Siddharth
2) John Smith

Changelog
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Original Advisory
http://blogsecurity.net/news/news-310507/

Deep Links
Links available to Secunia VIM customers