What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-12938: Newsletters <= 4.15 - Authenticated (Contributor+) Stored Cross-Site Scripting via 'target' Shortcode Attribute

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.4 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-07-29 · updated 2026-07-30
• Weakness: CWE-79

Description

The Newsletters Lite plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Stored Cross-Site Scripting via the 'target' attribute of the [newsletters_post] shortcode in versions up to and including 4.15. This is due to insufficient input sanitization and output escaping in the posts_single() function which propagates the attacker-controlled 'target' attribute into the global $wpml_target, and in the shortcode_posts() 'post_thumbnail' handler which concatenates $wpml_target into a target="..." HTML attribute without esc_attr(). This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Contributor-level access and above, to inject arbitrary web scripts in pages that will execute whenever a user accesses an injected page.

Affected products

• contrid Newsletters: through 4.15

References

• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/newsletters-lite/tags/4.15/helpers/shortcode.php#L464
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/newsletters-lite/tags/4.15/helpers/shortcode.php#L492
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/newsletters-lite/tags/4.15/helpers/shortcode.php#L845
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/newsletters-lite/tags/4.15/helpers/shortcode.php#L851
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/newsletters-lite/tags/4.15/includes/checkinit.php#L172
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset?reponame=&old=3621582%40newsletters-lite&new=3621582%40newsletters-lite
• https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/293abae5-a7fb-401f-af09-324a81ce8709?source=cve

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