This article is a part of our Vulnerability Database (back to index)
Cross-site Scripting occurrences in Smash Balloon Social Post Feed
The Smash Balloon Social Post Feed WordPress plugin before 4.1.1 was affected by a reflected XSS in custom-facebook-feed in cff-top admin page. (2022-01-17, CVE-2021-25065)
The Smash Balloon Social Post Feed WordPress plugin before 4.0.1 did not have any privilege or nonce validation before saving the plugin's setting. As a result, any logged-in user on a vulnerable site could update the settings and store rogue JavaScript on each of its posts and pages. (2021-11-29, CVE-2021-24918)
The Smash Balloon Social Post Feed WordPress plugin before 2.19.2 does not sanitise or escape the feedID POST parameter in its feed_locator AJAX action (available to both authenticated and unauthenticated users) before outputting a truncated version of it in the admin dashboard, leading to an unauthenticated Stored Cross-Site Scripting issue which will be executed in the context of a logged in administrator. (2021-09-13, CVE-2021-24508)
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>