Is Yoast SEO safe? Known vulnerabilities and latest version

The Yoast SEO – Advanced SEO with real-time guidance and built-in AI plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Stored Cross-Site Scripting via Post Slug (post_name) in all versions up to, and including, 28.0 due to insufficient input sanitization and output escaping. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with author-level access and above, to inject arbitrary web scripts in pages that will execute whenever a user accesses an injected page. This requires pretty permalinks to be enabled, as the exploit chain depends on get_permalink() embedding the stored percent-encoded post_name in the generated URL.

The Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Insecure Direct Object References in all versions up to, and including, 26.5. This is due to insufficient authorization checks in the Meta Search REST API endpoint that fail to verify post ownership. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Contributor-level access and above, to read sensitive SEO metadata from any post on the site via the 'post_id' parameter, including posts owned by other users, private posts, and draft posts.

The Yoast SEO – Advanced SEO with real-time guidance and built-in AI plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Stored Cross-Site Scripting via the the `jsonText` block attribute in all versions up to, and including, 27.1.1 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 Yoast SEO – Advanced SEO with real-time guidance and built-in AI plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Stored Cross-Site Scripting via the the `yoast-schema` block attribute in all versions up to, and including, 26.8 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 Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Stored Cross-Site Scripting via the ‘display_name’ author meta in all versions up to, and including, 22.6 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 Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Reflected Cross-Site Scripting via URLs in all versions up to, and including, 22.5 due to insufficient input sanitization and output escaping. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to inject arbitrary web scripts in pages that execute if they can successfully trick a user into performing an action such as clicking on a link.

Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting') vulnerability in Team Yoast Yoast SEO allows Stored XSS.This issue affects Yoast SEO: from n/a through 21.0.

The Yoast SEO WordPress plugin (from versions 16.7 until 17.2) discloses the full internal path of featured images in posts via the wp/v2/posts REST endpoints which could help an attacker identify other vulnerabilities or help during the exploitation of other identified vulnerabilities.

A Stored Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability was discovered in the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin before 3.4.1, which had built-in blacklist filters which were blacklisting Parenthesis as well as several functions such as alert but bypasses were found.

A Race condition vulnerability in unzip_file in admin/import/class-import-settings.php in the Yoast SEO (wordpress-seo) plugin before 9.2.0 for WordPress allows an SEO Manager to perform command execution on the Operating System via a ZIP import.

Cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in admin/google_search_console/class-gsc-table.php in the Yoast SEO plugin before 5.8.0 for WordPress allows remote attackers to inject arbitrary web script or HTML.

Cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in js/wp-seo-metabox.js in the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin before 2.2 for WordPress allows remote attackers to inject arbitrary web script or HTML via the post_title parameter to wp-admin/post-new.php, which is not properly handled in the snippet preview functionality.

Multiple cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities in admin/class-bulk-editor-list-table.php in the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin before 1.5.7, 1.6.x before 1.6.4, and 1.7.x before 1.7.4 for WordPress allow remote attackers to hijack the authentication of certain users for requests that conduct SQL injection attacks via the (1) order_by or (2) order parameter in the wpseo_bulk-editor page.

Multiple SQL injection vulnerabilities in admin/class-bulk-editor-list-table.php in the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin before 1.5.7, 1.6.x before 1.6.4, and 1.7.x before 1.7.4 for WordPress allow remote authenticated users to execute arbitrary SQL commands via the (1) order_by or (2) order parameter in the wpseo_bulk-editor page to wp-admin/admin.php. NOTE: this can be leveraged using CSRF to allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary SQL commands.