CVE-2026-15399: Animated Number Counters SQL injection vulnerability
medium 4.9 published 2026-10-13
- Affected versions
- 3.0 and older
- Fixed in
- 3.1 *
- Latest version
- 3.2
- Severity
- Medium · CVSS 4.9
- Active installs
- 2,000+
- Type
- SQL injection
* The source does not name a fixed version; this is the first wordpress.org release after the last affected version.
What an attacker needs
- Access: A logged-in account with Editor-level access or higher.
CVSS vector (score by Wordfence): CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
What to do now
- Update Animated Number Counters to 3.1 or newer (the latest is 3.2): Dashboard → Updates, or Plugins → “update now”.
- If you cannot update right away, deactivate it until you can.
- Turn on auto-updates for it: Plugins → “Enable auto-updates” on its row.
- Not sure which version you run? Check your version against every known Animated Number Counters issue.
With WP-CLI:
wp plugin get animated-number-counters --field=version. - If you ran an affected version and something looks off (new admin users, spam pages, redirects), run the free scan below.
The advisory
The Animated Number Counters plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to generic SQL Injection via the 'counterid' parameter in all versions up to, and including, 3.0 due to insufficient escaping on the user supplied parameter and lack of sufficient preparation on the existing SQL query. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with editor-level access and above, to append additional SQL queries into already existing queries that can be used to extract sensitive information from the database. This is a second-order SQL injection: the write path correctly uses $wpdb->prepare(), but that protection is not carried forward to the read path, where the retrieved value is concatenated unsanitized into unprepared queries in both a single-quoted string context and a bare numeric context.
References
- NVD CVE-2026-15399 nvd.nist.gov
- Wordfence advisory www.wordfence.com
- Code change (fix) plugins.trac.wordpress.org
- wordpress.org wordpress.org
- Plugin source plugins.trac.wordpress.org
Related
Ran an affected version? Check your site for signs of a hack
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Where this data comes from
- CVE record, score and references: NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD), checked 2026-11-04. This product uses data from the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD.
- Versions and install counts: wordpress.org/plugins/animated-number-counters (Plugins API), fetched 2026-11-04.
- The summary, “what an attacker needs” and “what to do” sections are our plain-English reading of the record and the plugin's release history; the quoted description is the record's own text. Spot an error? Email Daniel.