Strategic Overview
- Status
- Patched in 11.0
- Affected Theme
- Newspaper Lite
- Affected Version
<= 10.3.9.1- CVSS
- 6.1Medium
- Weakness type
- CWE-79 · Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
- CVE
CVE-2021-3135
At a glance
CVE-2021-3135 is a medium-severity Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting') vulnerability in the Newspaper Lite WordPress theme, affecting versions <= 10.3.9.1. 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 11.0; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed June 2021, reported by Truoc Phan.
Vulnerability Overview
An issue was discovered in the tagDiv Newspaper theme 10.3.9.1 for WordPress. It allows XSS via the wp-admin/admin-ajax.php td_block_id parameter in a td_ajax_block API call.
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 Newspaper Lite <= 10.3.9.1 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 Newspaper Lite the fix is 11.0: builds <= 10.3.9.1 are affected, anything from 11.0 onward is not.
Remediation
Update to version 11.0, or a newer patched version
How does WordSec protect against this?
The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to Newspaper Lite: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Newspaper Lite 11.0 closes this, and updating the theme is the step that ends it.
- Firewall
- Alerts
External References
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