Wordfence Argus Discovers Critical Vulnerability in Ghostscript, the Program That Turns Uploaded PDFs into Thumbnails on Your Server
On September 8, 2026, Artifex released Ghostscript 10.08.0, closing a critical heap buffer overflow that the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team, using Wordfence Argus, discovered and reported sixteen days earlier. It is tracked as CVE-2026-39919 and carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of 10. A crafted PDF containing a JPEG 2000 image can make Ghostscript write attacker-influenced bytes past the end of a memory buffer. We developed that corruption into unauthenticated remote code execution on a…
On September 8, 2026, Artifex released Ghostscript 10.08.0, closing a critical heap buffer overflow that the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team, using Wordfence Argus, discovered and reported sixteen days earlier. It is tracked as CVE-2026-39919 and carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of 10. A crafted PDF containing a JPEG 2000 image can make Ghostscript write attacker-influenced bytes past the end of a memory buffer. We developed that corruption into unauthenticated remote code execution on a purpose-built WordPress test site.
If you run a WordPress site, there isn’t a WordPress plugin to update. Ghostscript is supplied by the operating system or the container image, so most site owners will get the fix through their distribution or hosting provider. Containerized sites need to be rebuilt and redeployed from an updated base image. We tested ten Linux package environments on September 15, and the official WordPress Docker image snapshot we tested was one of the vulnerable ones.