Quick answers
- Is CVE-2026-97641 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-2026-97641 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-2026-97641?
- High severity, with a CVSS score of 7.2, published 2 October 2026.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- Relevanssi – A Better Search up to and including 4.28.3.
- Is there a fix for CVE-2026-97641?
- Yes: fixed in 4.28.4 and later. Until then: Restrict the "Allowable tags in excerpts" setting to an empty value or remove all tags from this configuration to prevent the XSS payload from being processed in excerpts. Junglewise finds every place you run it, drafts the upgrade and applies it once you approve.
- How is CVE-2026-97641 attacked?
- It is attacked over the network, in a software library.
- Am I affected by CVE-2026-97641?
- Check whether you run Relevanssi – A Better Search at an affected version. Junglewise does that check for you around the clock: connect your code, cloud and domains, and it matches new vulnerabilities like this one against what you actually run and tells you when one reaches you.
How to fix
- Fixed in: 4.28.4 and later
Restrict the "Allowable tags in excerpts" setting to an empty value or remove all tags from this configuration to prevent the XSS payload from being processed in excerpts.
Technical details
The plugin fails to properly sanitize and escape comment content when displaying search excerpts, allowing stored cross-site scripting (XSS) injection. Exploitation requires the "Allowable tags in excerpts" configuration to contain at least one tag whose name serves as a prefix of the attacker's injected tag name. The fix applies wp_kses_post() to escape the post_excerpt output in the admin search formatting function.
Affected products
- Relevanssi Relevanssi – A Better Search up to and including 4.28.3
Timeline
- 2026-10-02: disclosed
- 2026-09-26: patched