Description
The Blackhole for Bad Bots plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Stored Cross-Site Scripting via the User-Agent HTTP header in all versions up to and including 3.8. This is due to insufficient input sanitization and output escaping. The plugin uses sanitize_text_field() when capturing bot data (which strips HTML tags but does not escape HTML entities like double quotes), then stores the data via update_option(). When an administrator views the Bad Bots log page, the stored data is output directly into HTML input value attributes (lines 75-83) without esc_attr() and into HTML span content without esc_html(). This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to inject arbitrary web scripts that execute when an administrator views the Blackhole Bad Bots admin page.
Problem types
CWE-79 Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
Product status
Any version
Timeline
| 2026-03-17: | Vendor Notified |
| 2026-03-25: | Disclosed |
Credits
tadokun
References
www.wordfence.com/...-fdac-4e89-8867-4b771d9b4374?source=cve
plugins.trac.wordpress.org/...trunk/inc/badbots-register.php
plugins.trac.wordpress.org/...trunk/inc/badbots-register.php
plugins.trac.wordpress.org/...trunk/inc/badbots-register.php
plugins.trac.wordpress.org/...s/3.8/inc/badbots-register.php
plugins.trac.wordpress.org/...s/3.8/inc/badbots-register.php
plugins.trac.wordpress.org/...s/3.8/inc/badbots-register.php
plugins.trac.wordpress.org/...runk/inc/blackhole-helpers.php
plugins.trac.wordpress.org/.../3.8/inc/blackhole-helpers.php
plugins.trac.wordpress.org/...s/trunk/inc/blackhole-core.php
plugins.trac.wordpress.org/...ags/3.8/inc/blackhole-core.php
plugins.trac.wordpress.org/...bad-bots&sfp_email=&sfph_mail=