1. General Information

sNews is a free content management system (CMS) written in PHP and MySQL. It is available at http://snewscms.com/. In April 2011, Bkis Security discovered an XSS (Cross-site Scripting) vulnerability in sNews CMS version 1.7.1. Taking advantage of this vulnerability, hacker might execute malicious code or get cookie of CMS’s administrator.

Details: http://security.bkis.com/snews-1-7-1-xss-vulnerability/
SVRT Advisory:  Bkis 01-2011
Initial vendor notification:  01/05/2011
Release Date:  12/05/2011
Update Date:  12/05/2011
Discovered by:  Cao Xuan Sang - Bkis
Attack Type:  XSS
Security Rating:  High
Impact:  Code Execution
Affected Software:  sNews 1.7.1 ( possibly in some earlier versions )

2. Technical Descriptions

XSS vulnerability exists in “reorder” functions of administrator: Categories reorder, Articles reorder and Pages reorder. Here, input variables are not adequately checked and filtered before querying the database. Then if a special character is added to the value, the SQL query will have wrong syntax, and the erroneous notification is displayed in the browser accompanied with the value of the erroneous variable and the erroneous query, causing XSS vulnerability.
It is the administrators that are affected by this vulnerability. With different scenarios, hacker is able to steal the Administrator’s cookie or redirect the browser to a malicious website, etc. 

3. Solution
sNews’s development team has not issued the patches for this vulnerability yet. Thus, Bkis recommends individuals and organizations use this software and fix the flaw as the below solution:
Search in file snews.php:
  $type_id = str_replace($remove,'',$key);
Then, add the code below:
  $value = clean(cleanXSS(trim($value)));

4. About Bkis
Bkis is Vietnamese leading Company in researching, deploying network security software and solutions.
website: http://bkis.vn