The vulnerability allows a malicious user to easily gain super admin privilege. With the Super Admin access, the hacker has full control of the website.
Sucuri removed the technical details about the bug after receiving a request from the developer of VirtueMart.
"VirtueMart uses Joomla’s JUser class “bind” and “save” methods to handle user accounts information. That’s not a problem in it of itself, but this class is very tricky and easy to make mistakes with." Researcher wrote in Sucuri's blog post.
VirtueMart has claimed the bug is in Joomla. Researchers at Sucuri also believe the problem is on the Joomla class itself. However, few Joomla experts disagree with the VirtueMart and Sucuri.
"The vulnerability is in VirtueMart's amateurish use of JUser, not the JUser class itself. JUser is a low level API in Joomla! which expects filtered input." Nicholas Dionysopoulos, a contributer to Joomla Project, posted in a Facebook post.
"The modus operandi of programmatic user account creation in Joomla! is to first filter the input using JInput (typically through JFactory::getApplication()->input, not a new object instance), construct an array with only the keys you need and the pass this to JUser. "
The bug was discovered last week and have been fixed in the latest version of VirtueMart(v2.6.10).
