The Molongui Authorship – Author Boxes, Guest Authors & Co-Authors for WordPress plugin for…

Why it is Yellow

• CVSS 7.2 high
• Remotely exploitable without logging in

References

• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/molongui-authorship/tags/5.2.12/assets/js/byline.4cc4.min.js
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/molongui-authorship/tags/5.2.12/includes/author-filters.php#L29
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/molongui-authorship/tags/5.2.12/includes/author-filters.php#L464
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/molongui-authorship/tags/5.3.0/assets/js/byline.849a.min.js
• https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/1bf63dd3-9fd1-4b72-b7e0-48155312c48f?source=cve

Original description

The Molongui Authorship – Author Boxes, Guest Authors & Co-Authors for WordPress plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Stored DOM-Based Cross-Site Scripting via the 'comment (href attribute inside comment content)' parameter in all versions up to, and including, 5.2.12 due to insufficient input sanitization and output escaping. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to inject arbitrary web scripts in pages that will execute whenever a user accesses an injected page. This is exploitable in the free build because the plugin's author-filter rewriter never appends the ?m_bm=true marker to its own anchors (Plugin::has_pro() returns false), meaning every href the byline script selects and rewrites is fully attacker-controlled.