NextGEN Gallery - SQL Injection

Medium

Synopsis

NextGEN Gallery version prior to 4.2.1 are vulnerable to authenticated SQL injection via the 'orderby' parameter on the REST API endpoints '/imagely/v1/galleries' and '/imagely/v1/albums'.

The root cause is an insufficient sanitization function ('_clean_column()') in the data mapper layer that uses a character blacklist instead of a whitelist approach. This allows an authenticated attacker with the 'NextGEN Gallery overview' capability (assigned to the Administrator role by default) to inject arbitrary SQL into the 'ORDER BY' clause.

Solution

Upgrade to NextGEN Gallery version 4.2.1 or later.

Additional References

https://fr.wordpress.org/plugins/nextgen-gallery/

Disclosure Timeline

April 07, 2026 : Tenable sends request for contact
April 14, 2026 : Vendor acknowledgement
April 15, 2026 : Tenable sends details to vendor
May 19, 2026 : Asking for updates

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