CVE-2026-42176 Auth bypass in scoold
Attackers can forge JWTs to modify admin settings, gaining persistent administrator access after a service restart.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- An administrator
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- None listed
What is CVE-2026-42176?
CVE-2026-42176 is a medium-severity authentication bypass vulnerability in Erudika scoold, published on 8 May 2026. An attacker needs administrator access to exploit it, with no action from the victim.
Official description
Scoold is a Q&A and a knowledge sharing platform for teams. Prior to version 1.67.0, Scoold allows the admins configuration value to be modified through /api/config/set/admins with a forged Bearer token that is accepted as an admin API token. Once that setting is changed, the target email address is written to the application configuration file. The change does not become active immediately in the current process, because the ADMINS set is loaded once at startup. After a Scoold restart, though, the selected user is recognized as an administrator and gains access to the admin panel. This issue gives an attacker a reliable persistence path: write their own email into scoold.admins, wait for a restart or trigger one operationally, and the account comes back as admin. This issue has been patched in version 1.67.0.
Weakness: CWE-306
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-42176?
How do I fix CVE-2026-42176?
No fix has been published for CVE-2026-42176 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.
Upgrade, and rotate credentials and sessions that may have been exposed. More about Authentication bypass.
Is CVE-2026-42176 being exploited?
It is not confirmed as exploited in the wild, but public exploit code for CVE-2026-42176 exists.
Sources
Also known as GHSA-7qfx-c234-xg4g.