Contact Form Submissions <= 1.7.2 - Unauthenticated Stored Cross-Site Scripting
Strategic Overview
- Status
- Patched in 1.7.3
- Affected Plugin
- Contact Form Submissions
- Affected Version
< 1.7.3- CVSS
- 7.2High
- Weakness type
- CWE-79 · Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
- CVE
CVE-2022-0248
At a glance
CVE-2022-0248 is a high-severity Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting') vulnerability in the Contact Form Submissions WordPress plugin, affecting versions < 1.7.3. It carries a CVSS score of 7.2 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity). Exploitation requires no authentication. The issue is fixed in version 1.7.3; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed February 2022, reported by R3N0.
Vulnerability Overview
The Contact Form Submissions WordPress plugin before 1.7.3 does not sanitise and escape additional fields in contact form requests before outputting them in the related submission. As a result, unauthenticated attacker could perform Cross-Site Scripting attacks against admins viewing the malicious submission
Technical Analysis
The vector marks this flaw as remotely reachable over the network, with low attack complexity — no special timing or configuration is needed, and no privileges on the target site, and no interaction from a victim user.
CWE-79: Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
Reaching this weakness in Contact Form Submissions < 1.7.3 takes no account at all. Cross-site scripting happens when input from a request is written into a page without being escaped for the context it lands in, so the browser parses attacker-supplied text as markup or script.
Injected script runs with the privileges of whoever views the affected page, which is how these flaws turn into administrator session theft, silent account creation or persistent backdoors in page content. For Contact Form Submissions the fix is 1.7.3: builds < 1.7.3 are affected, anything from 1.7.3 onward is not.
Remediation
Update to version 1.7.3, or a newer patched version
How does WordSec protect against this?
Requests carrying this pattern arrive without a session, so nothing upstream of the firewall gets a chance to reject them: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Contact Form Submissions 1.7.3 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.
- Firewall
- Login Security
- Alerts
External References
Related records
Other vulnerabilities in Contact Form Submissions
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