Security News > 2020 > July > Ew, that's unsanitary: SEO plugin for WordPress would run arbitrary JavaScript inputs instead of scrubbing them
A popular WordPress search engine optimisation plugin with around two million installs could have been abused to hijack a target website, according to a threat intel firm.
"This flaw allowed authenticated users with contributor level access or above the ability to inject malicious scripts that would be executed if a victim accessed the wp-admin panel's 'all posts' page," said WordPress-focused infosec biz Wordfence in a blog post about the vuln in the All in One SEO Pack plugin.
With WordPress powering a large number of high-profile websites, and All in One SEO being very popular, the potential impact of the vuln was widespread. As its name suggests, the plugin is intended to make the appearance of one's blog posts on Google search results a simple and automated process.
"Unfortunately, the SEO meta data for posts, including the SEO title and SEO description fields, had no input sanitization allowing lower-level users like contributors and authors the ability to inject HTML and malicious JavaScript into those fields," said Wordfence.
An attacker who compromised a lower-level account could insert arbitrary JS into the SEO plugin metadata fields, with that JS being executed once the admin opened the draft post for editing.