What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2016-6897

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v3.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 28.8% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2017-01-18 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-352

Description

Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the wp_ajax_update_plugin function in wp-admin/includes/ajax-actions.php in WordPress before 4.6 allows remote attackers to hijack the authentication of subscribers for /dev/random read operations by leveraging a late call to the check_ajax_referer function, a related issue to CVE-2016-6896.

Affected products

• WordPress: through 4.5.5

References

• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2016/08/20/1
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/92572
• http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1036683
• https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/commit/8c82515ab62b88fb32d01c9778f0204b296f3568
• https://sumofpwn.nl/advisory/2016/path_traversal_vulnerability_in_wordpress_core_ajax_handlers.html
• https://wpvulndb.com/vulnerabilities/8606
• https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/40288/
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2016/08/20/1
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/92572
• http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1036683
• https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/commit/8c82515ab62b88fb32d01c9778f0204b296f3568
• https://sumofpwn.nl/advisory/2016/path_traversal_vulnerability_in_wordpress_core_ajax_handlers.html

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