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 has also released a video, as shown above, demonstrating how a remote attacker can make database admins unknowingly delete (DROP) an entire table from the database just by tricking them into clicking a specially crafted link.

"A feature of phpMyAdmin was using Get requests for Database operations such as DROP TABLE table_name; Get requests must be protected against CSRF attacks," Barot explains in a blog post.

Since the URLs for performing database operations via phpMyAdmin are stored in the web browser history, as discovered by the researcher, this vulnerability can lead to dangerous security risks.

"If a user executes a query on the database by clicking insert, DROP, etc. buttons, the URL will contain database name and table name," Barot says. "This vulnerability can result in the disclosure of sensitive information as the URL is stored at various places such as browser history, SIEM logs, Firewall Logs, ISP Logs, etc."

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.