Critical Flaw Reported In phpMyAdmin Lets Attackers Damage Databases (patches available)

[LASER_oneXM]

A critical security vulnerability has been reported in phpMyAdmin—one of the most popular applications for managing the MySQL database—which could allow remote attackers to perform dangerous database operations just by tricking administrators into clicking a link.

Discovered by an Indian security researcher, Ashutosh Barot, the vulnerability is a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attack and affects phpMyAdmin versions 4.7.x (prior to 4.7.7).

Cross-site request forgery vulnerability, also known as XSRF, is an attack wherein an attacker tricks an authenticated user into executing an unwanted action.

According to an advisory released by phpMyAdmin, "by deceiving a user to click on a crafted URL, it is possible to perform harmful database operations such as deleting records, dropping/truncating tables, etc."
phpMyAdmin is a free and open source administration tool for MySQL and MariaDB and is widely used to manage the database for websites created with WordPress, Joomla, and many other content management platforms.
Moreover, a lot of hosting providers use phpMyAdmin to offer their customers a convenient way to organize their databases.

Barot reported the vulnerability to phpMyAdmin developers, who confirmed his finding and released phpMyAdmin 4.7.7 to address this issue. So administrators are highly recommended to update their installations as soon as possible.

 

[Deleted member 65228]

This.

This vulnerability is definitely critical and important, PhpMyAdmin is used very extensively. Not updating would just be devastating mistake... The researcher is talented for finding the vulnerability, and will have helped to keep hundreds of thousands (that's an understatement - more like millions) of services safer.

 

[Danielx64]

Thank you for the head up. While I don't need to worry about updating this on a live server (I'm on shared hosting here), I will be updating my localhost (VM) install.