CVE•Published 2026-08-19•Modified 2026-08-26•1 article on news•6 live references•NVD data

CVE-2026-18051

Vulnerability data via NVD (ingested)

CVSS v3.1

10.0

CRITICAL

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:H/A:H

EPSS percentile

Exploit Prediction Scoring System · top 64% of all CVEs

Weaknesses (CWE)

CWE-22Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory ('Path Traversal')

Description

The W3 Total Cache WordPress plugin before 2.10.5 does not properly validate the request path it uses to build cache file names, allowing unauthenticated attackers to write a file into any existing directory on the server, inside or outside the web root, overwriting whatever occupies the target name. On Apache, the same flaw overwrites the site's .htaccess files, which breaks the site and can strip hardening rules that other security measures rely on.

Timeline

Published 2026-08-19

Modified 2026-08-26

External references

NVD MITRE Exploit-DB GitHub PoC trickest/cve VulnCheck

Search for exposed instances

Shodan + Censys queries derived from NVD's CPE data. The vuln tag catches assets Shodan has explicitly linked to this CVE; the product / banner fingerprints find exposed instances even when the vuln tag was never applied (which is common).

Shodan · vuln tag0 hosts

vuln:CVE-2026-18051

Hosts Shodan has explicitly fingerprinted as vulnerable.

More intel sources (5)

Shodan report

vuln:CVE-2026-18051

Country / ASN / product breakdown for the vuln query.

Censys

vulnerabilities.cve_id: CVE-2026-18051

Censys host search filtered to this CVE id.

grep.app

CVE-2026-18051