In reviewing reports of vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins to provide our customers with the best data on vulnerabilities in plugins they use, we often find that there are reports for things that don’t appear to be vulnerabilities. For more problematic reports, we release posts detailing why the vulnerability reports are false, but there have been a lot of that we haven’t felt rose to that level. In particular, are items that are not outright false, just the issue is probably more accurately described as a bug. For those that don’t rise to the level of getting their own post, we now place them in a weekly post when we come across them.

Admin+ Stored Cross-Site Scripting in Ninja Forms

Automattic’s WPScan made this claim about a supposed admin+ stored cross-site scripting vulnerability in the plugin Ninja Forms:

The plugin does not sanitise and escape field labels, allowing high privilege users to perform Cross-Site Scripting attacks even when the unfiltered_html capability is disallowed.

There usual lack of basic verification, despite claiming to have verified this, is shown there, as they didn’t even figure out what users would have access. To access the plugin’s settings, the user has to be logged in as an Administrator:

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add_submenu_page(
	$this->parent_slug,
	$this->get_page_title(),
	$this->get_menu_title(),
	apply_filters( 'ninja_forms_submenu_' . $this->get_menu_slug() . '_capability', $this->get_capability() ),

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public function get_capability()
{
	return $this->capability;

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public $capability = 'manage_options';

If an attacker is logged in as an Administrator they can do basically whatever they want, including usually allowing the unfiltered_html capability, so this really wouldn’t be a vulnerability.

This false report was given a CVE id by WPScan, CVE-2021-25056, despite not really being a vulnerability.

Plugin Security Scorecard Grade for Ninja Forms

See issues causing the plugin to get less than A+ grade