CVE-2026-42656

Contest Gallery – Upload & Vote Photos, Media, Sell with PayPal & Stripe <= 28.1.6 - Authenticated (Subscriber+) Stored Cross-Site Scripting

2026-04-29 00:00
endy

Strategic Overview

Status
Patched in 29.0.0
Affected Plugin
Contest Gallery – Upload & Vote Photos, Media, Sell with PayPal & Stripe
Affected Version
<= 28.1.6
CVSS
6.4Medium
Weakness type
CWE-79 · Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
CVE
CVE-2026-42656
View all Contest Gallery – Upload & Vote Photos, Media, Sell with PayPal & Stripe vulnerabilities

At a glance

CVE-2026-42656 is a medium-severity Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting') vulnerability in the Contest Gallery WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 28.1.6. It carries a CVSS score of 6.4 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity). Exploitation requires an authenticated account at Subscriber level or above. The issue is fixed in version 29.0.0; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed April 2026, reported by endy.

Vulnerability Overview

The Contest Gallery – Upload & Vote Photos, Media, Sell with PayPal & Stripe plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Stored Cross-Site Scripting in versions up to, and including, 28.1.6 due to insufficient input sanitization and output escaping. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with subscriber-level access and above, to inject arbitrary web scripts in pages that will execute whenever a user accesses an injected page.

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 interaction from a victim user.

CWE-79: Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')

Reaching this weakness in Contest Gallery <= 28.1.6 takes an account at Subscriber level or above. 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 Contest Gallery the fix is 29.0.0: builds <= 28.1.6 are affected, anything from 29.0.0 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 29.0.0, or a newer patched version

How does WordSec protect against this?

An attacker needs Subscriber access first, so the firewall sees the attempt as traffic from a logged-in account: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Contest Gallery 29.0.0 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

  • Firewall
  • Alerts

External References

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-42656https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/a1525119-732d-4948-9c33-75e9f3517c0dhttps://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-42656

Related records

Vulnerability data © Defiant, Inc., provided under the Wordfence Intelligence T&C