Secunia

Some vulnerabilities have been discovered in CuteNews, which can be exploited by malicious people to conduct cross-site scripting, script insertion, and request forgery attacks and by malicious users to conduct script insertion attacks, disclose sensitive information, bypass certain security restrictions, and compromise a vulnerable system.

1) Input passed to the "mod" parameter in 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 logged in user's browser session in the context of an affected site.

2) Input passed to the "add_ip" parameter when blocking IP addresses is not properly sanitised before being stored in data/ipban.db.php. This can be exploited to inject and execute arbitrary PHP code.

Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires administrative privileges and that support for ".htaccess" files is disabled.

3) Input passed via various parameters to multiple scripts 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.

Examples:
http://[host]/index.php?lastusername=[code]
http://[host]/register.php?result=[code]
http://[host]/search.php?user=[code]
http://[host]/search.php?title=[code]
http://[host]/index.php?mod=editnews&action=list&cat_msg=[code]
http://[host]/index.php?mod=editnews&action=list&postponed_selected=[code]
http://[host]/index.php?mod=editnews&action=list&unapproved_selected=[code]
http://[host]/index.php?mod=editnews&action=list&news_per_page=[code]

4) Input passed via the "comments" parameter to the comments page e.g. shownews.php (when "subaction" is set to "showcomments") is not properly sanitised before being displayed to the user. This can be exploited to insert arbitrary HTML and script code, which will be executed in a user's browser session in context of an affected site when the malicious data is being viewed.

5) Input passed via the "title", "short_story", and "full_story" parameters to index.php (when "mod" is set to "addnews" and "action" is set to "addnews") is not properly sanitised before being displayed to the user. This can be exploited to insert arbitrary HTML and script code, which will be executed in a user's browser session in context of an affected site when the malicious data is being viewed.

6) The application does not properly restrict access to the "Edit News" functionality. This can be exploited to change the content of news articles after it has been approved by the administrator.

7) The application allows users to perform certain actions via HTTP requests without performing any validity checks to verify the request. This can be exploited to e.g. create an arbitrary user with administrative rights.

8) Input passed via the "cat_name" parameter to index.php (when "mod" is set to "categories") is not properly sanitised before being used to create a new category. This can be exploited to insert and execute arbitrary PHP code by accessing /data/category.db.php.

Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires administrative privileges.

9) Input passed via the "save_con[skin]" parameter to index.php (when "mod" is set to "options" and "action" is set to "syscon") is not properly verified before being used to include files. This can be exploited to include arbitrary files from local resources via directory traversal attacks.

Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires administrative privileges.

The vulnerabilities are confirmed in version 1.4.6. Other versions may also be affected.

Solution
Edit the source code to ensure that input is properly sanitised and verified.
Further details available in Customer Area

Provided and/or discovered by
1, 2) athos
3 - 9) Andrew Horton, MorningStar Security

Changelog
Further details available in Customer Area

Original Advisory
http://milw0rm.com/exploits/7700
http://www.morningstarsecurity.com/advisories/MORNINGSTAR-2009-02-CuteNews.txt

Deep Links
Links available in Customer Area