Medium · published October 2, 2026
The Autoptimize plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Stored Cross-Site Scripting via Comment Author Name in all versions up to, and including, 3.1.15.1 due to insufficient input sanitization and output escaping. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to inject arbitrary web scripts in pages that will execute whenever a user accesses an injected page. Exploitation requires an administrator to have enabled Autoptimize's 'Lazy-load images?' option, the w3-total-cache/w3-total-cache.php file to be present on disk with the plugin disabled, a class named Minify_HTML to be loaded into scope by another plugin, and the malicious comment to be approved by a moderator before the payload renders.