What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2015-2942

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.1 v2.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 2.8% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2015-04-13 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-399

Description

MediaWiki before 1.19.24, 1.2x before 1.23.9, and 1.24.x before 1.24.2, when using HHVM, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (CPU and memory consumption) via a large number of nested entity references in an (1) SVG file or (2) XMP metadata in a PDF file, aka a "billion laughs attack," a different vulnerability than CVE-2015-2937.

Affected products

• Wikimedia Foundation MediaWiki: through 1.19.23; 1.20, 1.20.1, 1.20.2, 1.20.3, 1.20.4, 1.20.5 (+42)

References

• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2015/04/01/1
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2015/04/07/3
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/73477
• https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-announce/2015-March/000175.html
• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T85848
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201510-05
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2015/04/01/1
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2015/04/07/3
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/73477
• https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-announce/2015-March/000175.html
• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T85848
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201510-05

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