WordPress developers on Thursday announced the availability of version 5.2.3, a maintenance and security release that includes 29 fixes and enhancements, along with several security patches.
As far as security is concerned, WordPress 5.2.3 mostly patches cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities. Two of them have been reported by Simon Scannell of RIPS Technologies, including XSS bugs in post previews and in stored comments.
Earlier this year, RIPS disclosed two other WordPress vulnerabilities, both of which can be exploited for remote code execution.
WordPress developers have also credited Anshul Jain for a reflected XSS bug related to media uploads, Zhouyuan Yang of Fortinet for an XSS in shortcode previews, and Soroush Dalili of NCC Group for a URL sanitization issue that can lead to XSS attacks.
Ian Dunn of WordPress’ core security team found a reflected XSS vulnerability in the dashboard.
WordPress website owners and administrators have also been informed that jQuery has been updated on older versions of the CMS. Previous versions of jQuery are affected by a flaw that allows XSS attacks.
Websites that support automatic updates may have already been updated. The administrators of sites that are not updated automatically can update manually from the Updates section of their WordPress dashboard.
WordPress websites are often targeted by malicious actors, and while some attacks have leveraged flaws in WordPress itself, a majority of operations exploit vulnerabilities in popular plugins.
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Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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