What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-15149: Account takeover in NodeBB

• Severity: critical (CVSS 9.9 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 2.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2020-08-20 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-269

Description

NodeBB before version 1.14.3 has a bug introduced in version 1.12.2 in the validation logic that makes it possible to change the password of any user on a running NodeBB forum by sending a specially crafted socket.io call to the server. This could lead to a privilege escalation event due via an account takeover. As a workaround you may cherry-pick the following commit from the project's repository to your running instance of NodeBB: 16cee1b03ba3eee177834a1fdac4aa8a12b39d2a. This is fixed in version 1.14.3.

Affected products

• NodeBB: from 1.12.2 before 1.14.3 — fixed in 1.14.3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: NodeBB 1.14.3. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/159560/NodeBB-Forum-1.14.2-Account-Takeover.html
• https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/commit/c2477d9d5ffc43e5ffeb537ea2ceb4ce9592aa39
• https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/security/advisories/GHSA-hr66-c8pg-5mg7
• https://zeroauth.ltd/blog/2020/08/20/proof-of-concept-exploit-for-cve-2020-15149-nodebb-arbitrary-user-password-change/
• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/159560/NodeBB-Forum-1.14.2-Account-Takeover.html
• https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/commit/c2477d9d5ffc43e5ffeb537ea2ceb4ce9592aa39
• https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/security/advisories/GHSA-hr66-c8pg-5mg7
• https://zeroauth.ltd/blog/2020/08/20/proof-of-concept-exploit-for-cve-2020-15149-nodebb-arbitrary-user-password-change/

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