VIR Vulnerability Intelligence Relay

CVE-2016-6897

medium
Published 2017-01-18 · Modified 2026-05-13
💬 Discuss on Community ✚ Propose mitigation
CVSS v3
6.5
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
CVSS v4 NEW
—
not yet in upstream
VIR risk
7.5

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.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
75%
Patch ETA
—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

Exploits

Public proof-of-concept code below. AS-IS, for defenders and authorised testing only.

Exploit-DB

EDB-40288 webapps php verified
Yorick Koster · 2016-08-22

WordPress Core 4.5.3 - Directory Traversal / Denial of Service

Source code queued for fetch — refresh in a moment.

Metasploit modules

auxiliary_dos/http/wordpress_directory_traversal_dos rank 300
WordPress Traversal Directory DoS
Source fetch failed: fetch_error — view the original via the link above.

OS impact
debian Debian Fixed 5 releases
VersionStatusFixed in
trixie Fixed 4.6.1+dfsg-1
sid Fixed 4.6.1+dfsg-1
forky Fixed 4.6.1+dfsg-1
bullseye Fixed 4.6.1+dfsg-1
bookworm Fixed 4.6.1+dfsg-1

Application impact
VendorProductVersionsFixed
wordpress wordpresswordpress{"endIncluding":"4.5.5"}

References

CWEs

CWE-352

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.