CVE-2024-13431

Appointment Booking Calendar — Simply Schedule Appointments Booking Plugin <= 1.6.8.3 - Reflected Cross-Site Scripting

2025-03-06 20:14
Luciano Hanna

Strategic Overview

Status
Patched in 1.6.8.5
Affected Plugin
Simply Schedule Appointments
Affected Version
<= 1.6.8.3
CVSS
6.1Medium
Weakness type
CWE-79 · Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
CVE
CVE-2024-13431
View all Simply Schedule Appointments vulnerabilities

At a glance

CVE-2024-13431 is a medium-severity Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting') vulnerability in the Simply Schedule Appointments WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 1.6.8.3. It carries a CVSS score of 6.1 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity). Exploitation requires no authentication. The issue is fixed in version 1.6.8.5; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed March 2025, reported by Luciano Hanna.

Vulnerability Overview

The Appointment Booking Calendar — Simply Schedule Appointments Booking Plugin plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Reflected Cross-Site Scripting via the accent_color and background parameter in all versions up to, and including, 1.6.8.3 due to insufficient input sanitization and output escaping. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to inject arbitrary web scripts in pages that execute if they can successfully trick a user into performing an action such as clicking on a link.

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

Reaching this weakness in Simply Schedule Appointments <= 1.6.8.3 takes a caller who can reach the endpoint. 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 Simply Schedule Appointments the fix is 1.6.8.5: builds <= 1.6.8.3 are affected, anything from 1.6.8.5 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 1.6.8.5, or a newer patched version

How does WordSec protect against this?

The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to Simply Schedule Appointments: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Simply Schedule Appointments 1.6.8.5 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

  • Firewall
  • Alerts

External References

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2024-13431https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/f6e3e5dd-b9f1-4d24-98cc-b6ab319434e4https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-13431

Related records

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