CVE-2026-93767: Tainacan path traversal / file read vulnerability

medium 6.5 published 2026-10-16

Affected versions: 1.3.0 and older
Fixed in: 1.4.0 *
Latest version: 1.4.1
Severity: Medium · CVSS 6.5
Active installs: 1,000+
Type: Path traversal / file read

* 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 Subscriber-level access or higher.

CVSS vector (score by Wordfence): CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N

What to do now

Update Tainacan to 1.4.0 or newer (the latest is 1.4.1): 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 Tainacan issue. With WP-CLI: wp plugin get tainacan --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 Tainacan plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Directory Traversal in all versions up to, and including, 1.3.0 via the 'guid' parameter parameter. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with subscriber-level access and above, to read the contents of arbitrary files on the server, which can contain sensitive information. This vulnerability is exploitable only when the uploads/tainacan directory does not exist on the server, as this condition causes realpath() to return false, collapsing the base path to an empty string and rendering the containment check ineffective.

Description from the CVE record, published by Wordfence (the CVE Numbering Authority), via the NVD entry for CVE-2026-93767.

References

NVD CVE-2026-93767 nvd.nist.gov
Wordfence advisory www.wordfence.com
Code change (fix) plugins.trac.wordpress.org
Plugin source plugins.trac.wordpress.org

Ran an affected version? Check your site for signs of a hack

The free scan reads the public side of your site and looks for spam pages, hidden redirects, injected scripts and blacklist entries. No login, no install, about a minute.

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/tainacan (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.