What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-13457: InstaWP Connect <= 0.1.3.6 - Unauthenticated Cryptographic Key Disclosure

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.9% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-08-11 · updated 2026-08-12
• Weakness: CWE-434

Description

The InstaWP Connect – 1-click WP Staging & Migration plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Remote Code Execution in all versions up to, and including, 0.1.3.6 via the (top-level script) function. This is due to the plugin stores its encrypted options file as options-{migrate_key}.txt in wp-content/instawpbackups/ without deploying an index.php or .htaccess to prevent directory listing, exposing the 40-character migrate_key on Apache servers with directory indexing enabled, which allows an attacker to derive the AES-256-CBC passphrase via SHA256(migrate_key), decrypt the options file to recover the api_signature. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to get the database access details and api_signature. Exploitation requires the target WordPress site to be hosted on Apache with directory listing enabled (Options +Indexes) for the wp-content/instawpbackups/ directory, and time limited because it can only be exploited during the migration period.

Affected products

• InstaWP Connect: through 0.1.3.6

References

• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/instawp-connect/tags/0.1.3.4/includes/class-instawp-tools.php#L105
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/3634049/instawp-connect
• https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/f5319467-92f6-4d4f-a76a-12aeb25d3c6b?source=cve

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