CVE-2026-118784john-dagelmore WPSpeed cross-site scripting

What it is

Input is written into a web page without escaping, so an attacker's script runs in the browser of anyone who views it.

How it is reached

An attacker can exploit it over the network, with an ordinary user account, and nobody has to click anything.

What an attacker gains

The direct impact is limited: partial access to data or a partial outage. In practice, this kind of flaw lets an attacker act inside a signed-in user's browser session. The damage can spread past the vulnerable component into others.

Is it being exploited?

There is no public report of exploitation yet.

What to do

1. No fixed version is listed yet. Find every place john-dagelmore WPSpeed runs, watch the references for a fix, and plan a replacement if it is no longer supported.
2. While there is no fix, review who holds accounts that can reach it.

Description from NVD

The WPSpeed plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Stored Cross-Site Scripting in versions up to, and including, 2.6.10 This is due to a combination of two issues in the LightImages HTML optimizer: (1) Dispatcher::runOptimize() decides whether the current request is the site's home page by comparing only the URL path from REQUEST_URI against the path of the home URL, so on a plain-permalinks install the author archive URL /?author=<ID> is treated as the home page and the LightImages optimizer runs on it; and (2) LightImages::optimize() calls html_entity_decode() across the entire serialized DOMDocument output under the default-enabled img_processing_entity_decode setting, converting any entity-encoded markup present as plain text in the page (including WordPress's rendered author title) into live HTML. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Subscriber-level access and above, to store entity-encoded markup in their own nickname/display_name through the normal profile endpoint and have that markup rehydrated into executing script when any logged-out visitor loads their author archive.