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Cross-site Scripting occurrences in Contact Form
The Ninja Forms Contact Form WordPress plugin before 3.5.8.2 does not sanitise and escape the custom class name of the form field created, which could allow high privilege users to perform Cross-Site Scripting attacks even when the unfiltered_html capability is disallowed. (2021-10-25, CVE-2021-24381)
The Contact Form by Supsystic WordPress plugin before 1.7.15 did not sanitise the tab parameter of its options page before outputting it in an attribute, leading to a reflected Cross-Site Scripting issue (2021-05-05, CVE-2021-24276)
A stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability exists in the WPForms Contact Form (aka wpforms-lite) plugin before 1.5.9 for WordPress. (2020-03-24, CVE-2020-10385)
Why Cross-site Scripting can be dangerous
Cross site scripting is an attack where a web page executes code that is injected by an adversary. It usually appears, when users input is presented. This attack can be used to impersonate a user, take over control of the session, or even steal API keys.
The attack can be executed e.g. when you application injects the request parameter directly into the HTML code of the page returned to the user:
https://server.com/confirmation?message=Transaction+Complete
what results in:
<span>Confirmation: Transaction Complete</span>
In that case the message can be modified to become a valid Javascript code, e.g.:
https://server.com/confirmation?message=<script>dangerous javascript code here</script>
and it will be executed locally by the user's browser with full access to the user's personal application/browser data:
<span>Confirmation: <script>dangerous javascript code here</script></span>