Flaw in popular WordPress plug-in Jetpack puts over a million websites at risk

Owners of WordPress-based websites should update the Jetpack plug-in as soon as possible because of a serious flaw that could expose their users to attacks.

Jetpack is a popular plug-in that offers free website optimization, management and security features. It was developed by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and the WordPress open-source project, and has over 1 million active installations.

Researchers from Web security firm Sucuri have found a stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that affects all Jetpack releases since 2012, starting with version 2.0.

The issue is located in the Shortcode Embeds Jetpack module which allows users to embed external videos, images, documents, tweets and other resources into their content. It can be easily exploited to inject malicious JavaScript code into comments.

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