Medium · published August 5, 2026
The Football Pool plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Reflected Cross-Site Scripting via the `shouttext` POST parameter of the Shoutbox widget in all versions up to, and including, 2.13.4 due to insufficient input sanitization and output escaping. When a shoutbox form submission fails the nonce check (or `shouttext` is empty, or the user is unable to save), the raw POST value is echoed back into a `<textarea>` element using `printf('%s', ...)` with no HTML escaping. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary web scripts in the browser of an authenticated victim (Subscriber-level or higher) who is tricked into submitting a crafted POST request to a page that contains the Shoutbox widget.