CVE-2026-76984: Improper neutralization of input during web page generation in Apache Wicket.

Improper neutralization of input during web page generation in Apache Wicket.

Improper neutralization of input during web page generation in Apache Wicket. org.apache.wicket.markup.head.MetaDataHeaderItem generates <meta> and <link> header tags. It escaped the attribute names it wrote, but ran the attribute values through a replacement of " with \". A backslash before a double quote means nothing in HTML, so a value containing a double quote ends its own attribute and what follows is parsed as further attributes of the generated tag. An application is affected where it supplies an attribute value holding data an attacker can influence, through addTagAttribute or the forMetaTag and forLinkTag factory methods. A value may be given as an IModel, so it is not necessarily a literal. There is no setting to change; an application can only avoid supplying a value that contains a double quote. Note that these values have never been escaped effectively: before the change released in 6.24.0, 7.4.0 and 8.0.0 they were written with no escaping at all. This issue affects Apache Wicket: from 8.0.0 through 8.18.0, from 9.0.0 through 9.23.0, from 10.0.0 through 10.10.0. Older, unsupported releases from 6.17.0 onwards are also affected. Users are recommended to upgrade to

Description from the National Vulnerability Database, published by security@apache.org

What it means for a small business

Apache Wicket runs on web servers, so this is mostly your hosting company's to fix. On shared hosting you can't patch it yourself, but you can ask.

Ask your host whether your server runs it, whether it's updated, and on what date. A good host answers that in a day.

How likely is an attack? The Exploit Prediction Scoring System, run by FIRST (the global association of security response teams), puts the odds of this one being exploited in the next 30 days at 0.51%, higher than 43% of CVEs. That’s low, but low isn’t zero, and the odds jump the day someone publishes an exploit. Scored October 28, 2026, updated daily.

Check your own setup

Website check: reads what your site runs from the outside (WordPress version, plugins it can see, old server software) and matches it against this database.
Server check: what your web server says about itself, and whether that version has known flaws.

Sources

Part of the Huttenlocher Technologies vulnerability database, refreshed twice a day from CISA and the NVD. The title, category and plain-language guidance are ours; check the linked record before acting on a detail. This is general guidance, not a review of your systems.

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