Vulnerability in BetterDocs – AI Documentation, Knowledge Base, Docs, Wikis, FAQ with Chatbot — CVE-2026-75980
What to do now
Update BetterDocs – AI Documentation, Knowledge Base, Docs, Wikis, FAQ with Chatbot to 4.8.2 or later.
Affected versions
- Everything up to and including 4.8.1
Affected: BetterDocs – AI Documentation, Knowledge Base, Docs, Wikis, FAQ with Chatbot (plugin, betterdocs)
What the vulnerability is
The BetterDocs – AI Documentation, Knowledge Base, Docs, Wikis, FAQ with Chatbot plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Stored Cross-Site Scripting via Heading 'id' Attribute in Post Content in all versions up to, and including, 4.8.1 due to insufficient input sanitization and output escaping. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with contributor-level access and above, to inject arbitrary web scripts in pages that will execute whenever a user accesses an injected page. The exploit survives wp_kses_post because entity-encoded quotes in a heading id attribute are treated as a single legitimate attribute value at save time; the dangerous payload only materialises after process_content_for_toc() calls html_entity_decode() on the stored content and the broken id is extracted by a lazy regex before being echoed unescaped into the Table of Contents output.
Sources
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/betterdocs/tags/4.8.1/includes/Shortcodes/ToC.php#L147
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/betterdocs/tags/4.8.1/includes/Shortcodes/ToC.php#L75
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/betterdocs/tags/4.8.1/includes/Utils/Node.php#L22
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/betterdocs/tags/4.8.1/views/shortcodes/toc.php#L50
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset?reponame=&old=3656697%40betterdocs&new=3656697%40betterdocs
- https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/d1305df9-5002-4352-875c-2dcba7b06c10?source=cve