CVE-2026-48888

7.5

Automattic · WooCommerce

A resource exhaustion vulnerability in the WooCommerce plugin for WordPress allows unauthenticated attackers to trigger a Denial of Service (DoS) condition via excessive HTTP requests.

Executive summary

The WooCommerce plugin contains a critical resource exhaustion flaw that allows unauthenticated remote attackers to perform a Denial of Service attack against the host site.

Vulnerability

The vulnerability is categorized as an Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling issue (CWE-770), allowing unauthenticated users to overwhelm system resources through crafted HTTP requests.

Business impact

Successful exploitation of this vulnerability can lead to significant service degradation or total site downtime, directly impacting business continuity and user accessibility. With a CVSS score of 7.5, the high severity reflects the ease of exploitation, as it requires no authentication and can be performed remotely by any actor with network access to the application.

Remediation

Immediate Action: Update the WooCommerce plugin to version 11.1.0 or later to implement the necessary resource throttling controls.

Proactive Monitoring: Monitor server CPU and memory utilization patterns, and review HTTP access logs for high volumes of repeated requests originating from suspicious or singular IP addresses.

Compensating Controls: Deploy a Web Application Firewall (WAF) with rate-limiting rules configured to detect and block anomalous spikes in traffic directed at the WordPress instance.

Exploitation status

Public Exploit Available: False

Analyst recommendation

Given the high CVSS score and the potential for complete service disruption, organizations should prioritize the update of the WooCommerce plugin immediately. Administrators must ensure that the patch is applied across all environments to prevent potential DoS attacks that could paralyze business operations.

History

  1. Disclosed CVE record published
  2. Collected by CVE Brief via github
  3. Analyst report written
  4. Published in the daily brief high section

Sources

Originally found and disclosed by Ananda Dhakal | Patchstack, per the CVE Program record.