CVE-2026-96667 in Real Estate Manager Plugin
Summary
by MITRE • 10/10/2026
The Real Estate Manager – Property Listing and Agent Management plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Stored Cross-Site Scripting via the 'first_name' parameter in all versions up to, and including, 7.3 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. The reCAPTCHA check is trivially bypassed by omitting the g-recaptcha-response parameter entirely, since validation only runs when that parameter is present.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 10/10/2026
The Real Estate Manager – Property Listing and Agent Management plugin for WordPress contains a critical security flaw affecting all versions up to and including 7.3. This vulnerability manifests as a Stored Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) issue, specifically targeting the first_name parameter within the agent management functionality. The root cause of this weakness lies in insufficient input sanitization and output escaping mechanisms implemented by the plugin developers. When user-supplied data is processed without adequate validation or encoding before being stored in the database, malicious scripts can be embedded directly into the application's persistent storage. This architectural oversight allows attackers to inject arbitrary web-based scripts that are subsequently served to other users when they view the compromised pages.
The operational impact of this vulnerability is significant because it enables unauthenticated attackers to execute code within the context of a victim user’s browser session. Since the XSS payload is stored on the server, every time an administrator or another agent views the affected page containing the injected script, the malicious code executes automatically. This can lead to severe consequences such as session hijacking, where attackers steal authentication cookies to impersonate legitimate users; defacement of the website content; redirection of victims to phishing sites designed to harvest credentials; or installation of malware on the victim’s system through drive-by downloads. The persistence of the payload means that a single successful injection can compromise multiple users over an extended period without further action from the attacker.
A critical factor facilitating this exploitation is the trivial bypass of the reCAPTCHA protection mechanism integrated into the plugin's forms. The validation logic for reCAPTCHA is flawed because it only executes when the g-recaptcha-response parameter is present in the request payload. Attackers can easily circumvent this security control by simply omitting the g-recaptcha-response field entirely from their HTTP requests. This design error effectively renders the anti-bot protection useless against automated scripts or manual exploitation tools that do not include the expected token, allowing malicious submissions to pass through validation checks undetected and be stored in the database alongside legitimate data.
From a classification perspective, this vulnerability aligns with CWE-79, which describes Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation commonly known as Cross-site Scripting. The specific mechanism involves insufficient sanitization of user input before storage (CWE-20) and lack of output encoding when rendering content to the browser (CWE-83). In terms of offensive security frameworks, this attack vector corresponds to MITRE ATT&CK technique T1059, specifically sub-technique 007 for Command and Scripting Interpreter: JavaScript. The ability to execute arbitrary code in a victim’s browser allows attackers to perform actions such as stealing sensitive information or manipulating the user interface, which falls under the broader category of Client-Side Attacks within the ATT&CK matrix.
To mitigate this vulnerability, immediate action is required from site administrators and developers. The most effective remediation step is to upgrade the Real Estate Manager plugin to a version released after 7.3, where these issues have been addressed by implementing robust input validation and proper output encoding techniques such as HTML entity encoding for all user-supplied data before storage or display. Developers should also review the reCAPTCHA implementation logic to ensure that security controls are enforced regardless of whether optional parameters like g-recaptcha-response are present in the request payload, ensuring that missing tokens trigger a rejection rather than a bypass. Additionally, implementing Content Security Policy headers can provide an additional layer of defense by restricting the sources from which scripts can be loaded and executed, thereby limiting the impact of any successful XSS injection even if it occurs.