SOC status:Duty analyst on shift

UK Cyber Defence
VulnerabilityDeferred

CVE-2026-19902

The Ad Inserter – Ad Manager & AdSense Ads plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Reflected Cross-Site Scripting via the Referer header in all versions up to, and including, 2.8.18 due to insufficient input sanitization and output escaping on the…

MEDIUM 6.1EPSS 0.26%

Does this matter?

Lower severity and a low EPSS score (0.26%). Track it; it rarely justifies an emergency change on its own.

Description

The Ad Inserter – Ad Manager & AdSense Ads plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Reflected Cross-Site Scripting via the Referer header in all versions up to, and including, 2.8.18 due to insufficient input sanitization and output escaping on the '{search-query}' dynamic tag. When an ad block's code contains that tag, replace_ai_tags() reads $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] and tests it with the regex /[\.\/](google|yahoo|bing|ask)\.[a-z\.]{2,5}[\/]/i. The leading [\.\/] class matches a literal slash, so any referrer merely containing a segment such as '/google.com/' passes as a search-engine referral; the plugin then percent-decodes the referring query with parse_str() and substitutes the resulting 'q' (or 'p') value into the block via preg_replace() with no escaping. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary JavaScript in the context of the site for any visitor, including a signed-in administrator, by luring them to an attacker-controlled page that frames or links to any ordinary post. Exploitation requires the site to have an ad block whose code uses the '{search-query}' tag with automatic insertion enabled — a documented plugin feature used as intended.

CVSS 3.1
6.1 MEDIUMCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:N
EPSS
0.26% probability · 17th percentile
Public exploits
None in Exploit-DB
CISA KEV
Not listed
Weakness
CWE-79
Source
security@wordfence.com
EPSS trend
0%3%5%2 October 2026: 0.26%26 October 2026: 0.26%2 October 202626 October 2026

EPSS moved from 0.3% on 2 October 2026 to 0.3% on 26 October 2026.

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA, exploits from Exploit-DB. Refreshed daily. Download this record as JSON.