Blackhole for Bad Bots <= 3.8 - Unauthenticated Stored Cross-Site Scripting via User-Agent HTTP Header
Strategic Overview
<= 3.8CVE-2026-4329Vulnerability Overview
The Blackhole for Bad Bots plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Stored Cross-Site Scripting via the User-Agent HTTP header in all versions up to and including 3.8. This is due to insufficient input sanitization and output escaping. The plugin uses sanitize_text_field() when capturing bot data (which strips HTML tags but does not escape HTML entities like double quotes), then stores the data via update_option(). When an administrator views the Bad Bots log page, the stored data is output directly into HTML input value attributes (lines 75-83) without esc_attr() and into HTML span content without esc_html(). This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to inject arbitrary web scripts that execute when an administrator views the Blackhole Bad Bots admin page.
Technical Analysis
REMEDIATION: Update to version 3.8.1, or a newer patched version --- IDENTIFIER: CWE-79 (Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')) The product does not neutralize or incorrectly neutralizes user-controllable input before it is placed in output that is used as a web page that is served to other users.
External References
Vulnerability data © Defiant, Inc., provided under the Wordfence Intelligence T&C