jQuery Hover Footnotes <= 1.4 - Cross-Site Request Forgery to Plugin Settings Update
Strategic Overview
- Status
- Unpatched
- Affected Plugin
- jQuery Hover Footnotes
- Affected Version
<= 1.4- CVSS
- 4.3Medium
- Weakness type
- CWE-352 · Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
- CVE
CVE-2026-10553
At a glance
CVE-2026-10553 is a medium-severity Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the jQuery Hover Footnotes WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 1.4. It carries a CVSS score of 4.3 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity). Exploitation requires no authentication. No fixed release has been reported yet; treat installations running this software as exposed. Disclosed June 2026, reported by nishida azuka.
Vulnerability Overview
The jQuery Hover Footnotes plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery in all versions up to, and including, 1.4. This is due to missing or incorrect nonce validation on the jqFootnotes_options_subpanel function. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to update the plugin's settings with arbitrary values that, because option values such as jqfoot_anchor_open, jqfoot_anchor_close, and jqfoot_title are echoed unescaped into frontend page content, can be chained into persistent Cross-Site Scripting affecting all site visitors via a forged request granted they can trick a site administrator into performing an action such as clicking on a link. Successful exploitation of the CSRF vulnerability can be chained into stored Cross-Site Scripting, as the overwritten option values are persisted via update_option() without sanitization and rendered unescaped on the frontend.
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.
CWE-352: Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
jQuery Hover Footnotes <= 1.4 carries this weakness at update_option(), and reaching it takes a caller who can reach the endpoint. Cross-site request forgery abuses the fact that browsers attach a victim's cookies to any request, so a state-changing action that only checks who you are, not whether you meant to act, can be triggered from another site.
An attacker who gets a logged-in user to load a crafted page can perform that action as them, with the impact scaling to whatever the victim's role is allowed to do. No fixed build of this plugin is recorded for jQuery Hover Footnotes yet, so installs running <= 1.4 stay exposed until the vendor ships one.
Remediation
No known patch available. Please review the vulnerability's details in depth and employ mitigations based on your organization's risk tolerance. It may be best to uninstall the affected software and find a replacement.
How does WordSec protect against this?
The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to jQuery Hover Footnotes: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. No patched version is recorded yet, which is the case where a filtering layer matters most, because there is nothing to update to.
- Firewall
- Alerts
External References
Related records
Other vulnerabilities in jQuery Hover Footnotes
Vulnerability data © Defiant, Inc., provided under the Wordfence Intelligence T&C