Secunia

Some vulnerabilities and a weakness have been discovered in PowerNews, which can be exploited by malicious users to compromise a vulnerable system and by malicious people to conduct cross-site scripting and SQL injection attacks, disclose certain information, and compromise a vulnerable system.

1) Input passed to the "page" and "subpage" parameters in categories.inc.php, news.inc.php, other.inc.php, permissions.inc.php, templates.inc.php, and users.inc.php (all in the pnadmin folder) is not properly verified before being used to include files. This can be exploited to include arbitrary files from local or remote resources.

2) Input passed to the "page" parameter in pnadmin/index.php is not properly verified before being used to include files. This can be exploited to include arbitrary files from local or remote resources.

Successful exploitation requires administrator credentials.

3) Input passed to the "loginerror" parameter in pnadmin/index.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 "register_globals" is enabled.

4) Input passed to the "pnlogin_nickname" parameter in pnadmin/login.inc.php in is not properly sanitised before being used in SQL queries. This can be exploited to manipulate SQL queries by injecting arbitrary code.

Note: Successful exploitation of some of the vulnerabilities may require that "magic_quotes_gpc" is disabled.

5) Different error messages are returned depending on whether an unsuccessful login attempt is performed with a valid or invalid username.

The vulnerabilities and the weakness are confirmed in version 2.5.6. Other versions may also be affected.

Solution
Edit the source code to ensure that input is properly sanitised and verified. Return a general error message for unsuccessful login attempts.
Further details available in Customer Area

Provided and/or discovered by
1, 2) Alexandr Polyakov, Stas Svistunovich, Digital Security Research Group
3-5) An anonymous person

Changelog
Further details available in Customer Area

Original Advisory
http://milw0rm.com/exploits/5082

Deep Links
Links available in Customer Area