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Improper AuthenticationWeakness · CWE-287

CVE-2026-16055

HIGH · 7.5 CVSS v3.1 Published 2026-08-05
No fix yet
No fix has been published. The vendor has not shipped a fixed release or patch. You remain exposed.
See remediation →
81/100
Remediation priority · High
Remotely reachable Zero-click 14 days old

Official description Straight from the sourceThe vendor's or NVD's own wording, published unedited. Authoritative, but often terse — it says what broke, rarely what to do.

NVD · unedited
The Contest Gallery WordPress plugin before 30.0.7 does not route its front-end login through the standard WordPress authentication flow, issuing an authentication cookie directly after the password check, which bypasses installed brute-force-protection and two-factor-authentication Contest Gallery WordPress plugin before 30.0.7 and enables unlimited, unthrottled password guessing against any account (including administrators) up to full account takeover.

Technical summary Written by usOur analysis, written from the advisory, the CVSS vector and the affected-version data. It adds context the advisory leaves out, and never invents facts that are not in the source.

dbcve analysis
How this class of weakness works · CWE-287

The mechanism that verifies who a user is can be side-stepped or fooled, letting an attacker act as someone they're not. Everything built on top of that identity then becomes untrustworthy. Fixing it means hardening the full authentication flow, including edge cases, tokens, and secondary paths.

General guidance for the improper authentication class — the official description and references above are authoritative for this specific CVE. Want a bespoke review and a reviewed fix? Ask our team →

CVSS breakdown How the score is builtThe industry scoring standard. It rates how the flaw is reached, what it takes to exploit, and what an attacker gains — the score is derived from those, not the other way round.

From the vector
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
High
Privileges
Low
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
High
Integrity
High
Availability
High

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

Remediation Closing itWhat it takes to close this. Where a vendor fix exists we point at it; where none exists we say so plainly, and can build one. Effort estimates are scoped from the advisory, not from your codebase.

dbcve · scoped
Recommended fix High confidence

30.0.7

  1. Back up the WordPress site database and files before making any changes
  2. Update the Contest Gallery plugin to version 30.0.7 or later through the WordPress admin dashboard (Plugins > Add New > Upload or directly via Plugins list if update available), or via WP-CLI: wp plugin update contest-gallery
  3. Verify the update was applied successfully by checking the installed version in Plugins list
  4. Test the plugin login functionality to ensure it now properly routes through WordPress authentication flow
  5. Confirm brute-force protection and two-factor authentication plugins are now effective against login attempts via Contest Gallery

Generated from the published advisory — verify against the referenced sources before acting.

No vendor fix exists The vendor has not published a patch for this.

There is no version to upgrade to and no patch to apply. Every affected install stays exposed until the vendor ships a fix — or somebody else builds one.

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References Go to the primary sourcePrimary sources — vendor advisories, patches and trackers. Where our summary and a reference disagree, the reference wins.

Primary sources

Practitioner notes

Contributed

Peer-ranked notes from engineers who’ve handled CVE-2026-16055 in production — separate from our analysis above.

No notes yet

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What this is

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What belongs here
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  • Version or environment caveats, and links to real fixes
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