WordPress Product Catalog Plugin SQL Injection via AJAX

Product Catalog 8 1.2 plugin for WordPress contains an SQL injection vulnerability that allows unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary SQL queries by injecting malicious code through the selectedCategory parameter. Attackers can submit POST requests to the admin-ajax.php endpoint with the UpdateCategoryList action to extract sensitive database information from WordPress tables.

Casky was already ahead

This CVE exploits attack patterns that Casky's 301matched skills already investigate — long before this vulnerability was disclosed. Claude's reasoning model maps these techniques to MITRE ATT&CK, so practitioners who ran these skills have already seen the threat behaviour in their findings.

Analysis

The Product Catalog 8 1.2 WordPress plugin contains a critical SQL injection vulnerability (CWE-89) that allows unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary SQL commands. By injecting malicious code through the selectedCategory parameter in POST requests to admin-ajax.php with the UpdateCategoryList action, adversaries can bypass authentication entirely and extract sensitive data directly from WordPress databases. This vulnerability affects any website running the vulnerable plugin version, making it particularly dangerous since WordPress powers over 40% of all websites. The 8.2 CVSS score reflects the severe impact: attackers can read, modify, or delete database contents without user interaction or special privileges.

Casky's 301 matched security skills leverage Claude AI's extended reasoning to identify the attack patterns underlying this vulnerability across MITRE ATT&CK techniques TA0001 (Reconnaissance) and TA0043 (Reconnaissance via web applications). Practitioners using Casky would detect suspicious patterns including: POST requests to admin-ajax.php with abnormal parameter encoding (SQL keywords in the selectedCategory field), database query anomalies indicating information gathering, and unauthorized data exfiltration attempts. The platform's skills map exploitation indicators to T1595 (Active Scanning), T1592 (Gather Victim Org Information), and T1190 (Exploit Public-Facing Application), enabling security teams to correlate request patterns, identify injection payloads in logs, and distinguish between legitimate category filtering and malicious SQL concatenation before database compromise occurs.

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Casky Risk Score

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EPSS Probability

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Shodan Exposure

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GreyNoise Signal

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Composite risk scoring from EPSS, CISA KEV, Shodan, and GreyNoise — 21 security APIs correlated into a single Casky Risk Score. Coming in Casky Pro. Join early access →

301 Casky skills cover this attack pattern

These skills use Claude AI's reasoning model to surface findings in the same attack categories as CVE-2016-20065.

analyzing-apt-group-with-mitre-navigator

threat intelligence · low

Run

analyzing-campaign-attribution-evidence

threat intelligence · low

Run

analyzing-certificate-transparency-for-phishing

threat intelligence · low

Run

MITRE ATT&CK Techniques

TA0001 TA0043

Investigate the attack patterns behind CVE-2016-20065

Casky has 301 skills that investigate the attack patterns behind CVE-2016-20065. Run one and get CVSS-scored findings in 3 minutes.

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