freescout-help-desk freescout up to 1.8.212 HTML Attribute app/Misc/Helper.php linkify HTML injection

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability categorized as problematic has been discovered in freescout-help-desk freescout up to 1.8.212. Impacted is the function linkify of the file app/Misc/Helper.php of the component HTML Attribute Handler. The manipulation results in HTML injection. This vulnerability is identified as CVE-2026-40565. The attack can be executed remotely. There is not any exploit available. It is advisable to upgrade the affected component.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability classified as problematic has been found in freescout-help-desk freescout up to 1.8.212. Affected is the function linkify of the file app/Misc/Helper.php of the component HTML Attribute Handler. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a html injection vulnerability. CWE is classifying the issue as CWE-79. The product does not neutralize or incorrectly neutralizes user-controllable input before it is placed in output that is used as a web page that is served to other users. This is going to have an impact on integrity. CVE summarizes:

FreeScout is a free self-hosted help desk and shared mailbox. Prior to version 1.8.213, FreeScout's linkify() function in app/Misc/Helper.php converts plain-text URLs in email bodies into HTML anchor tags without escaping double-quote characters (") in the URL. HTMLPurifier (called first via getCleanBody()) preserves literal " characters in text nodes. linkify() then wraps URLs including those " chars inside an unescaped href="..." attribute, breaking out of the href and injecting arbitrary HTML attributes. Version 1.8.213 fixes the issue.

The advisory is available at github.com. This vulnerability is traded as CVE-2026-40565 since 04/14/2026. The exploitability is told to be easy. It is possible to launch the attack remotely. The exploitation doesn't require any form of authentication. Successful exploitation requires user interaction by the victim. Technical details are known, but there is no available exploit. This vulnerability is assigned to T1059.007 by the MITRE ATT&CK project.

By approaching the search of inurl:app/Misc/Helper.php it is possible to find vulnerable targets with Google Hacking.

Upgrading to version 1.8.213 eliminates this vulnerability. The upgrade is hosted for download at github.com. Applying the patch 265379b3ae343f06846adc0aa8510643d1eac2df is able to eliminate this problem. The bugfix is ready for download at github.com. The best possible mitigation is suggested to be upgrading to the latest version.

If you want to get best quality of vulnerability data, you may have to visit VulDB.

Productinfo

Vendor

• freescout-help-desk

Name

• freescout

Version

• 1.8.212

License

• open-source

Website

• Product: https://github.com/freescout-help-desk/freescout/

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• 🔒

CPE 2.2info

• 🔒

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If you want to get best quality of vulnerability data, you may have to visit VulDB.

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