Smartarget Popup <= 1.7 - Authenticated (Administrator+) Stored Cross-Site Scripting
Strategic Overview
- Status
- Patched in 1.8
- Affected Plugin
- Smartarget Popup
- Affected Version
<= 1.7- CVSS
- 5.5Medium
- Weakness type
- CWE-79 · Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
- CVE
CVE-2025-31853
At a glance
CVE-2025-31853 is a medium-severity Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting') vulnerability in the Smartarget Popup WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 1.7. It carries a CVSS score of 5.5 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity). Exploitation requires an authenticated account at Administrator level or above. The issue is fixed in version 1.8; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed April 2025, reported by Nguyen Khanh Hao.
Vulnerability Overview
The Smartarget Popup plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Stored Cross-Site Scripting in versions up to, and including, 1.7 due to insufficient input sanitization and output escaping. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with administrator-level access and above, to inject arbitrary web scripts in pages that will execute whenever a user accesses an injected page. This only impacts multi-site installations and installations where unfiltered_html has been disabled.
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 Smartarget Popup <= 1.7 takes an account at Administrator 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 Smartarget Popup the fix is 1.8: builds <= 1.7 are affected, anything from 1.8 onward is not.
Remediation
Update to version 1.8, or a newer patched version
How does WordSec protect against this?
An attacker needs Administrator 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: Smartarget Popup 1.8 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.
- Firewall
- Alerts
External References
Vulnerability data © Defiant, Inc., provided under the Wordfence Intelligence T&C