Total Contest Lite <= 2.8.1 - Reflected Cross-Site Scripting
Strategic Overview
- Status
- Patched in 2.9.0
- Affected Plugin
- Photo Contest | Competition | Video Contest
- Affected Version
<= 2.8.1- CVSS
- 6.1Medium
- Weakness type
- CWE-79 · Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
- CVE
CVE-2024-13822
At a glance
CVE-2024-13822 is a medium-severity Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting') vulnerability in the Photo Contest WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 2.8.1. 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 2.9.0; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed February 2025, reported by Hassan Khan Yusufzai - Splint3r7.
Vulnerability Overview
The Photo Contest | Competition | Video Contest plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Reflected Cross-Site Scripting in all versions up to, and including, 2.8.1 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. CVE-2025-23782 may be a duplicate of this.
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 Photo Contest <= 2.8.1 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 Photo Contest the fix is 2.9.0: builds <= 2.8.1 are affected, anything from 2.9.0 onward is not.
Remediation
Update to version 2.9.0, or a newer patched version
How does WordSec protect against this?
The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to Photo Contest: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Photo Contest 2.9.0 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.
- Firewall
- Alerts
External References
Related records
Other vulnerabilities in Photo Contest | Competition | Video Contest
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