CVE-2020-15118
In Wagtail before versions 2.7.4 and 2.9.3, when a form page type is made available to Wagtail editors through the wagtail.contrib.forms app, and the page template is built using Django's standard form rendering helpers such as form.as_p, any HTML tags used within a form field's help text will be rendered unescaped in the page. Allowing HTML within help text is an intentional design decision by Django; however, as a matter of policy Wagtail does not allow editors to insert arbitrary HTML by default, as this could potentially be used to carry out cross-site scripting attacks, including privilege escalation. This functionality should therefore not have been made available to editor-level users. The vulnerability is not exploitable by an ordinary site visitor without access to the Wagtail admin. Patched versions have been released as Wagtail 2.7.4 (for the LTS 2.7 branch) and Wagtail 2.9.3 (for the current 2.9 branch). In these versions, help text will be escaped to prevent the inclusion of HTML tags. Site owners who wish to re-enable the use of HTML within help text (and are willing to accept the risk of this being exploited by editors) may set WAGTAILFORMS_HELP_TEXT_ALLOW_HTML = True in their configuration settings. Site owners who are unable to upgrade to the new versions can secure their form page templates by rendering forms field-by-field as per Django's documentation, but omitting the |safe filter when outputting the help text.
| Software | From | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
| torchbox / wagtail | 2.9 | 2.9.3 |
| torchbox / wagtail | 2.7 | 2.7.4 |
wagtail
|
2.8.0 | 2.9.3 |
|
wagtail
|
- | 2.7.4 |
- https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/ref/models/fields/#django.db.models.Field.help_text
- https://docs.wagtail.io/en/stable/reference/contrib/forms/index.html#usage
- https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/blob/master/docs/releases/2.9.3.rst
- https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/commit/d9a41e7f24d08c024acc9a3094940199df94db34
- https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/security/advisories/GHSA-2473-9hgq-j7xw
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A security vulnerability is a weakness in software, hardware, or configuration that can be exploited to compromise confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Many vulnerabilities are tracked as CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), which provide a standardized identifier so teams can coordinate patching, mitigation, and risk assessment across tools and vendors.
CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) estimates technical severity, but it doesn't automatically equal business risk. Prioritize using context like internet exposure, affected asset criticality, known exploitation (proof-of-concept or in-the-wild), and whether compensating controls exist. A "Medium" CVSS on an exposed, production system can be more urgent than a "Critical" on an isolated, non-production host.
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Recurring findings usually come from incomplete Asset Discovery, inconsistent patch management, inherited images, and configuration drift. In modern environments, you also need to watch the software supply chain: dependencies, containers, build pipelines, and third-party services can reintroduce the same weakness even after you patch a single host. Unknown or unmanaged assets (often called Shadow IT) are a common reason the same issues resurface.
Use a simple, repeatable triage model: focus first on externally exposed assets, high-value systems (identity, VPN, email, production), vulnerabilities with known exploits, and issues that enable remote code execution or privilege escalation. Then enforce patch SLAs and track progress using consistent metrics so remediation is steady, not reactive.
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