What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2022-21683: Comment reply notifications sent to incorrect users in wagtail

• Severity: medium (CVSS 4.3 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.0% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2022-01-18 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-200

Description

Wagtail is a Django based content management system focused on flexibility and user experience. When notifications for new replies in comment threads are sent, they are sent to all users who have replied or commented anywhere on the site, rather than only in the relevant threads. This means that a user could listen in to new comment replies on pages they have not have editing access to, as long as they have left a comment or reply somewhere on the site. A patched version has been released as Wagtail 2.15.2, which restores the intended behaviour - to send notifications for new replies to the participants in the active thread only (editing permissions are not considered). New comments can be disabled by setting `WAGTAILADMIN_COMMENTS_ENABLED = False` in the Django settings file.

Affected products

• wagtail: from 2.13 before 2.15.2 — fixed in 2.15.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: wagtail 2.15.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/commit/5fe901e5d86ed02dbbb63039a897582951266afd
• https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/releases/tag/v2.15.2
• https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/security/advisories/GHSA-xqxm-2rpm-3889
• https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/commit/5fe901e5d86ed02dbbb63039a897582951266afd
• https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/releases/tag/v2.15.2
• https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/security/advisories/GHSA-xqxm-2rpm-3889

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