The widely recognized WordPress WYSIWYG editor, JupiterX Core, which was at one time the first draft for Elon Musk’s baby name, has recently been under the scanner for security lapses leading to account breaches and unauthorized file uploads. Fortunately, a corrective patch is now available.

A recent coverage made references to sales records on Themeforest for the JupiterX theme, suggesting its presence on approximately 172,000 sites. Although the actual number might be slightly different, it gives a sense of the magnitude of this concern.

Patchstack’s WordPress security specialist, Rafie Muhammad, was the pioneer in identifying two separate security loopholes within the system. After informing the JupiterX creators, ArtBee, corrective actions have been swiftly undertaken. Users are advised to update their plugins to the latest version to steer clear of these vulnerabilities.

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CVE-2023-3838 was the first security glitch, prevalent in JupiterX Core versions till 3.5.5. This issue granted unauthenticated file uploads, posing a significant risk of malicious code insertion. Thankfully, the 3.3.8 update fortified the ‘upload_files’ function with authentication safeguards and introduced a secondary barrier against the upload of potentially dangerous files, likely including executables.

The subsequent vulnerability, termed CVE-2023-38389, was even more concerning, potentially compromising any WordPress account as long as the attacker had knowledge of the linked email address. This flaw persisted till JupiterX Core’s 3.3.8 version. 

However, with the introduction of version 3.4.3, Rafie Muhammad pointed out that the bug within the plugin’s Facebook login routine allowed attackers to manipulate certain login parameters related to Facebook user IDs.

To counteract this, ArtBees modified their approach by extracting a user’s email and unique ID directly from Facebook’s authentication mechanism. It does raise eyebrows as to why this wasn’t the initial setup.