# CVE-2026-111874: OpenCATS Career Portal CareersUI.php processLogin excessive authentication

> Attackers can bypass authentication restrictions in the OpenCATS Career Portal login process, potentially enabling brute-force attacks due to missing rate limiting.

- **Severity:** Medium 6.3 (`CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:H/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:L/VI:N/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:P`)
- **Exploited in the wild:** Not known
- **Login needed:** Not needed
- **Attackable:** Over the internet
- **Victim action needed:** Not needed
- **Fix available:** No
- **Published:** 18 Oct 2026
- **Updated:** 19 Oct 2026
- **Also known as:** GHSA-4m5j-grw9-w64h

## What is CVE-2026-111874?

CVE-2026-111874 is a medium-severity vulnerability in OpenCATS, published on 18 Oct 2026. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

### Official description

A flaw has been found in OpenCATS 0.10.0. Affected is the function processLogin of the file modules/careers/CareersUI.php of the component Career Portal. This manipulation of the argument applyToJobSubAction causes improper restriction of excessive authentication attempts. Remote exploitation of the attack is possible. A high degree of complexity is needed for the attack. The exploitability is told to be difficult. The exploit has been published and may be used. Patch name: 1cf4fa3ee9054314b023be79d404078645c22ade. It is suggested to install a patch to address this issue. The project maintainer explains: "Candidates will now need to authenticate each time they access the Career Portal and successfully complete the CAPTCHA as part of that authentication flow. The authenticated candidate identity is now maintained server-side rather than relying on the previous persistent client-side cats…cw cookie mechanism. Application-level rate limiting is deliberately not in scope for this change. In my view, request throttling and brute-force protection of that kind are better applied at the network, reverse-proxy or web-server layer, where they can be configured appropriately for each deployment without OpenCATS having to implement and maintain its own rate-limiting framework. I'll update the online documentation to that effect."

Weakness: CWE-799 (Improper Control of Interaction Frequency), CWE-307 (Improper Restriction of Excessive Authentication Attempts)

## Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-111874?


## How do I fix CVE-2026-111874?

No fix has been published for CVE-2026-111874 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.

## Is CVE-2026-111874 being exploited?

It is not confirmed as exploited in the wild, but public exploit code for CVE-2026-111874 exists.

## Fix prompt for AI coding agents

```text
Check this codebase for CVE-2026-111874 and fix it if it is affected.

What it is: CVE-2026-111874 is a medium-severity vulnerability in OpenCATS, published on 18 Oct 2026. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.
Exploitation: It is not confirmed as exploited in the wild, but public exploit code for CVE-2026-111874 exists.

Affected product: OpenCATS. No package-level version data is available, so check the vendor advisory linked from the reference page.

Task:
1. Search the dependency manifests and lockfiles (for example package.json, package-lock.json, requirements.txt, poetry.lock, uv.lock, pom.xml, build.gradle, go.mod, Cargo.lock, Gemfile.lock) and any Dockerfiles for the affected packages, including transitive dependencies.
2. If an affected version is in use, upgrade it to the fixed version for its release line with the project's package manager, so the lockfile is regenerated. Prefer the smallest upgrade that fixes it.
3. If there is no fix, or the upgrade would break the build, do not guess: explain the risk and the safest workaround instead.
4. Run the tests and summarise what changed and why.
5. If nothing in the project is affected, say so and change nothing.

Reference: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2026-111874/ (Markdown: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2026-111874/index.md)
```

## Sources

- CVE record: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-111874
- NVD: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-111874
- OSV: https://osv.dev/vulnerability/CVE-2026-111874

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From sbomify Insights: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2026-111874/
Summaries are generated and may contain mistakes; the official description above is the record.