Actively exploited · Published Mar 24, 2019 · Assigned by mitre
CVE-2019-9978
Medium 6.1 Exploited
In plain English
A medium-severity cross-site scripting in Social Warfare Plugin from WordPress. Attackers are actively exploiting it in the wild (listed by CISA on November 3, 2021). The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 72.9% (higher than 99.5% of all known vulnerabilities). Ready-made attack tooling exists: Nuclei, public proof-of-concept code. Apply updates per vendor instructions.
CISA guidance
Apply updates per vendor instructions.
Federal agencies must remediate by May 3, 2022.
Official description
The social-warfare plugin before 3.5.3 for WordPress has stored XSS via the wp-admin/admin-post.php?swp_debug=load_options swp_url parameter, as exploited in the wild in March 2019. This affects Social Warfare and Social Warfare Pro.
Affected products (as reported)
Weakness: CWE-79 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:N
References
- https://wpvulndb.com/vulnerabilities/9238 x_refsource_MISC
- https://www.cybersecurity-help.cz/vdb/SB2019032105 x_refsource_MISC
- https://blog.sucuri.net/2019/03/zero-day-stored-xss-in-social-warfare.html x_refsource_MISC
- https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2019/03/unpatched-zero-day-vulnerability-in-social-warfare-plugin-exploited-in-the-wild/ x_refsource_MISC
- https://www.pluginvulnerabilities.com/2019/03/21/full-disclosure-of-settings-change-persistent-cross-site-scripting-xss-vulnerability-in-social-warfare/ x_refsource_MISC
- https://wordpress.org/plugins/social-warfare/#developers x_refsource_MISC
- https://twitter.com/warfareplugins/status/1108852747099652099 x_refsource_MISC
- 46794 exploit, x_refsource_EXPLOIT-DB
- http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/152722/Wordpress-Social-Warfare-Remote-Code-Execution.html x_refsource_MISC
- http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/163680/WordPress-Social-Warfare-3.5.2-Remote-Code-Execution.html x_refsource_MISC
- http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2025/Jun/1
- https://www.cisa.gov/known-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog?field_cve=CVE-2019-9978 government-resource