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Cross-site Scripting occurrences in Wp Offload Ses Lite
The WP Offload SES Lite WordPress plugin before 1.4.5 did not escape some of the fields in the Activity page of the admin dashboard, such as the email's id, subject and recipient, which could lead to Stored Cross-Site Scripting issues when an attacker can control any of these fields, like the subject when filling a contact form for example. The XSS will be executed in the context of a logged in admin viewing the Activity tab of the plugin. (2021-07-06, CVE-2021-24494)
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>