CVE-2026-16599: GNU Wget

Medium severity, CVSS 5.1. EPSS: 0.4% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

GNU wget is vulnerable to denial of service in its FTP OPIE/S-KEY authentication functionality. The server-supplied sequence number from the FTP challenge line is used as an iteration count for an MD5 key-derivation loop without any upper bound validation. A malicious FTP server or a network attacker positioned to intercept FTP traffic can send a crafted OPIE challenge with a sequence number near INT_MAX, causing wget to perform up to approximately 2.1 billion MD5 computations and suspend for some time. The --timeout option does not mitigate this because it applies only to network I/O, not CPU computation. This issue was fixed in commit e9697d98e7249b0f68a6be040a4f3dcc5bc101fa

Affected products

• GNU Wget: up to and including 1.25.0

Published 2026-08-25. Last modified 2026-08-28.