jQuery before 1.9.0 is vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting (XSS) attacks. The jQuery(strInput) function does not differentiate selectors from HTML in a reliable fashion. In vulnerable versions, jQuery determined whether the input was HTML by looking for the '<' character anywhere in the string, giving attackers more flexibility when attempting to construct a malicious payload. In fixed versions, jQuery only deems the input to be HTML if it explicitly starts with the '<' character, limiting exploitability only to attackers who can control the beginning of a string, which is far less common.
https://snyk.io/vuln/npm:jquery:20120206
https://github.com/jquery/jquery/commit/05531fc4080ae24070930d15ae0cea7ae056457d
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/102792
http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/161972/Linksys-EA7500-2.0.8.194281-Cross-Site-Scripting.html
http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/153237/RetireJS-CORS-Issue-Script-Execution.html
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2020-03/msg00041.html