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Fencer Intel
critical 9.8

CVE-2019-11231 in the critical feed json

An issue was discovered in GetSimple CMS through 3.3.15.

published 7y ago modified 4mo ago also EUVD-2019-2930

cvss
9.8
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
71.6%
EPSS 71.6% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 99.4%
public exploits
2
Metasploit and Exploit-DB

Summary

An issue was discovered in GetSimple CMS through 3.3.15. insufficient input sanitation in the theme-edit.php file allows upload of files with arbitrary content (PHP code, for example). This vulnerability is triggered by an authenticated user; however, authentication can be bypassed. According to the official documentation for installation step 10, an admin is required to upload all the files, including the .htaccess files, and run a health check. However, what is overlooked is that the Apache HTTP Server by default no longer enables the AllowOverride directive, leading to data/users/admin.xml password exposure. The passwords are hashed but this can be bypassed by starting with the data/other/authorization.xml API key. This allows one to target the session state, since they decided to roll their own implementation. The cookie_name is crafted information that can be leaked from the frontend (site name and version). If a someone leaks the API key and the admin username, then they can bypass authentication. To do so, they need to supply a cookie based on an SHA-1 computation of this known information. The vulnerability exists in the admin/theme-edit.php file. This file checks for forms submissions via POST requests, and for the csrf nonce. If the nonce sent is correct, then the file provided by the user is uploaded. There is a path traversal allowing write access outside the jailed themes directory root. Exploiting the traversal is not necessary because the .htaccess file is ignored. A contributing factor is that there isn't another check on the extension before saving the file, with the assumption that the parameter content is safe. This allows the creation of web accessible and executable files with arbitrary content.

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Timeline

  1. First public exploit (Metasploit exploit/multi/http/getsimplecms_unauth_code_exec)
  2. Published

Exploit prediction

71.60% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 99.4% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

Exploits and checks

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.0 9.8 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 2.0 5.0 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:N/A:N

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-22 Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.