Security researchers discovered a Magento flaw that could allow threat actors to penetrate and control features within the popular e-commerce site without authentication.

The Adobe-owned company rushed to offer a patch after a blog post on Sucuri late last week outlined details of an injection vulnerability dubbed PRODSECBUG-2198. Cybercriminals would have to download and crack the necessary password hashes to exploit the vulnerability, but once they do, it would be relatively simple to skim credit card numbers or install backdoors.

In fact, the Magento flaw was given a rating of 8.8, or “very easy” in terms of how readily it could be used to target e-commerce sites.

Reverse Engineering the Magento Flaw

To prove the severity of the threat, researchers said they were able to reverse engineer the official patch and create a working proof of concept of how it might be used by attackers. The vulnerability threatens e-commerce sites that use both the commercial edition of Magento and the open-source version and may go back to some of the product’s earliest releases.

So far, attacks in the wild have not been reported. However, researchers said cybercriminals could use the Magento flaw to inject SQL commands to steal admin rights, usernames and passwords, and other sensitive information. Worse, such attacks could be automated to target a wider pool of vulnerable e-commerce sites simultaneously — a serious concern given that Magento has an estimated 300,000 customers.

The patch subsequently released by Magento covers several other bugs. In the meantime, the researchers recommended monitoring for multiple hits to paths such as /catalog/product/frontend_action_synchronize, which might indicate threat actor are trying to exploit the vulnerability.

Assess Your Patch Management Posture

Effective patch management is critical to defend against threats exploiting the Magento vulnerability. Patch posture reporting can help security teams determine the severity of the threat, when a patch was released, whether other patches have since superseded it and even which machines might be offline for repair. This enables the organization to measure the effectiveness of both its patch management processes and the patches themselves in remediating threats.