VIR Vulnerability Intelligence Relay

CVE-2017-17672

critical
Published 2017-12-14 · Modified 2026-05-13
💬 Discuss on Community ✚ Propose mitigation
CVSS v3
9.8
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS v4 NEW
—
not yet in upstream
VIR risk
10.0

Description

In vBulletin through 5.3.x, there is an unauthenticated deserialization vulnerability that leads to arbitrary file deletion and, under certain circumstances, code execution, because of unsafe usage of PHP's unserialize() in vB_Library_Template's cacheTemplates() function, which is a publicly exposed API. This is exploited with the templateidlist parameter to ajax/api/template/cacheTemplates.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
97%
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-43362 webapps multiple
SecuriTeam · 2017-12-13

vBulletin 5.x - 'cacheTemplates' Remote Arbitrary File Deletion

Source code queued for fetch — refresh in a moment.

Application impact
VendorProductVersionsFixed
vbulletinvbulletin{"startIncluding":"5.0.1","endIncluding":"5.3.3"}
vbulletinvbulletin5.0.0

References

CWEs

CWE-502

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

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