Skip to content
Fencer Intel
high 7.1

CVE-2016-6896 in the critical feed json

Directory traversal vulnerability in the wp_ajax_update_plugin function in wp-admin/includes/ajax-actions.php in WordPress 4.5.3 allows rem…

published 2017-01-18 9 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2016-7781

cvss
7.1
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
38.1%
EPSS 38.1% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 98%
public exploits
1
Exploit-DB

Summary

Directory traversal vulnerability in the wp_ajax_update_plugin function in wp-admin/includes/ajax-actions.php in WordPress 4.5.3 allows remote authenticated users to cause a denial of service or read certain text files via a .. (dot dot) in the plugin parameter to wp-admin/admin-ajax.php, as demonstrated by /dev/random read operations that deplete the entropy pool.

Patch / fix

  • wordpress Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 4.6.1+dfsg-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2016-6896

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2016-6896 updated

wordpress: Multiple vulnerabilities fixed in wordpress 4.6

  • Red Hat All currently supported Red Hat products
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Timeline

  1. First public exploit (EDB-40288)
  2. Published

Exploit prediction

38.07% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 98% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

Exploits and checks

  • EDB-40288 WordPress Core 4.5.3 - Directory Traversal / Denial of Service webapps, 2016-08-22
  • sumofpwn.nl https://sumofpwn.nl/advisory/2016/path_traversal_vulnerability_in_wordpress_core_ajax_handlers.html referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.0 7.1 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 5.5 AV:N/AC:L/Au:S/C:P/I:N/A:P

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-22 Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory
Technology feeds

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.