WordPress Plugin Vulnerabilities

Blackhole for Bad Bots < 3.8.1 - Unauthenticated Stored Cross-Site Scripting via User-Agent HTTP Header

Description

The Blackhole for Bad Bots plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Stored Cross-Site Scripting via the User-Agent HTTP header in all versions up to and including 3.8. This is due to insufficient input sanitization and output escaping. The plugin uses sanitize_text_field() when capturing bot data (which strips HTML tags but does not escape HTML entities like double quotes), then stores the data via update_option(). When an administrator views the Bad Bots log page, the stored data is output directly into HTML input value attributes (lines 75-83) without esc_attr() and into HTML span content without esc_html(). This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to inject arbitrary web scripts that execute when an administrator views the Blackhole Bad Bots admin page.

Affects Plugins

Fixed in 3.8.1

References

Classification

Type
XSS
CWE
CVSS

Miscellaneous

Original Researcher
Huynh Pham Thanh Luc
Verified
No

Timeline

Publicly Published
2026-03-25 (about 1 month ago)
Added
2026-03-25 (about 1 month ago)
Last Updated
2026-03-26 (about 1 month ago)

Other