CVE-2016-10045: Joomla!

Critical severity, CVSS 9.8. EPSS: 97.7% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

The isMail transport in PHPMailer before 5.2.20 might allow remote attackers to pass extra parameters to the mail command and consequently execute arbitrary code by leveraging improper interaction between the escapeshellarg function and internal escaping performed in the mail function in PHP. NOTE: this vulnerability exists because of an incorrect fix for CVE-2016-10033.

Affected products

• Joomla! Joomla!: from 1.5.0, up to and including 3.6.5
• PHPMailer Project PHPMailer: before 5.2.20 (fixed in 5.2.20)
• WordPress WordPress: up to and including 4.7

Published 2016-12-30. Last modified 2026-06-17.