CVE-2024-4312 is a medium-severity Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability identified in the Soccer Engine – Soccer Plugin for WordPress, affecting all versions up to and including 1.12. The root cause is the absence or incorrect implementation of nonce validation when saving match and team settings within the plugin. Nonces in WordPress are security tokens used to verify that requests originate from legitimate users and prevent unauthorized actions. Without proper nonce checks, attackers can craft malicious requests that, when executed by an authenticated administrator (via clicking a link or visiting a malicious page), cause unintended changes to plugin configurations, teams, players, or other related data. This vulnerability does not require the attacker to be authenticated but does require the victim to have administrative privileges and to interact with the malicious content. The attack vector is network-based (remote), with low attack complexity and no privileges required for the attacker. The vulnerability impacts the integrity of the plugin's data but does not affect confidentiality or availability. No public exploits have been reported yet, and no official patches are linked, indicating that mitigation may require manual nonce implementation or plugin updates once released. The vulnerability is cataloged under CWE-352, which covers CSRF issues, and has a CVSS v3.1 base score of 4.3, reflecting medium severity.

The primary impact of CVE-2024-4312 is unauthorized modification of plugin settings and soccer-related data such as teams and players. This can lead to data integrity issues, misinformation on websites, and potential disruption of user trust or site functionality. For organizations relying on this plugin to manage sports content, unauthorized changes could damage their reputation or cause operational confusion. Since the vulnerability requires an administrator to be tricked into clicking a malicious link, the risk is somewhat mitigated by user awareness but remains significant in environments with multiple administrators or less security-conscious users. There is no direct impact on data confidentiality or site availability, but integrity compromise can indirectly affect business processes and user experience. The lack of known exploits reduces immediate risk, but the widespread use of WordPress and the plugin in soccer-related websites globally means many organizations could be targeted if exploit code emerges. Attackers could use this vulnerability as part of broader social engineering or targeted attacks against sports organizations, fan sites, or content providers.

1. Immediate mitigation involves educating WordPress site administrators about the risks of clicking untrusted links and implementing strict user interaction policies. 2. Site owners should monitor for plugin updates from the vendor and apply patches as soon as they become available. 3. In the absence of an official patch, administrators or developers should manually implement nonce validation for all state-changing requests in the plugin, ensuring that every form submission or AJAX request includes a valid nonce check. 4. Restrict administrative access to trusted users only and consider multi-factor authentication to reduce the risk of compromised credentials. 5. Employ Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) with rules to detect and block suspicious CSRF attempts targeting the plugin’s endpoints. 6. Regularly audit plugin configurations and logs to detect unauthorized changes promptly. 7. Consider temporarily disabling or replacing the plugin if immediate patching is not feasible and the risk is unacceptable. 8. Use Content Security Policy (CSP) headers to limit the ability of attackers to execute malicious scripts or forge requests from external sites.