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Blackhole for Bad Bots

blackhole-bad-bots
total installs
30,000
total vulns
1
critical
0
high
1
medium
0
low
0
latest vuln
patched
1
unpatched
0
avg time to patch
vulnerabilities (1)
Blackhole for Bad Bots <= 3.8 - Unauthenticated Stored Cross-Site Scripting via User-Agent HTTP Header
high ✓ patched
cvss score 7.2
cwe CWE-79: Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
published Mar 25, 2026
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.