What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-76212: phpMyFAQ before 4.1.7 LIKE Wildcard Injection via PostgreSQL

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2026-08-19 · updated 2026-09-01
• Weakness: CWE-88

Description

phpMyFAQ before 4.1.7, when configured to use PostgreSQL via the native pgsql PHP extension, declares an incorrect LIKE ESCAPE character ('=') in the Search/Database/Pgsql.php backend while escapeLikeWildcards() escapes user input with the '|' prefix. As a result, wildcard escaping is a no-op and user-supplied % and _ characters remain active LIKE wildcards. An unauthenticated attacker can submit such characters in the public FAQ search form to force maximally broad pattern matches and expensive sequential scans, resulting in a denial of service. The PDO PostgreSQL backend is not affected, and quotes remain escaped so this does not enable quote-breaking SQL injection or data exfiltration.

Affected products

• thorsten phpMyFAQ: before 4.1.7 — fixed in 4.1.7

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: thorsten phpMyFAQ 4.1.7. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/thorsten/phpMyFAQ/security/advisories/GHSA-5hx6-c293-588h
• https://www.vulncheck.com/advisories/phpmyfaq-before-like-wildcard-injection-via-postgresql
• https://github.com/thorsten/phpMyFAQ/security/advisories/GHSA-5hx6-c293-588h

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