Hugo is a static site generator. From 0.123.0 to 0.161.1, a regression made  RootMappingFs.statRoot  use  Stat  (follows symlinks) instead of  Lstat , so a direct  resources.Get  of a symlink pointing outside its mount returned the target's contents — letting a symlink planted in a local mount (e.g. a vendored  themes/  theme) read arbitrary files accessible to the Hugo user. Go-module themes from GitHub (symlinks stripped) and directory walks were unaffected. Fixed in 0.162.0.

Affected: Go: github.com/gohugoio/hugo

**Commit:** [f8b5fa09a6](https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/commit/f8b5fa09a6) — _Fix prevention of direct symlink reads in resources.Get_ **Affected versions:** v0.123.0 through v0.161.1. Earlier versions are not affected. **Fixed in:** v0.162.0. **Severity:** Medium. Requires the attacker to be able to place (or convince a site author to place) a symlink inside a mounted directory — for example, inside a locally-vendored theme under `themes/`. Themes mounted as Go modules from GitHub have symlinks stripped on download and are not affected. Multi-directory walks (e.g. content/asset walking) were not affected either; only direct lookups via `resources.Get` followed symlinks.

**Description.** Hugo's virtual filesystem is designed so that files under a mount cannot reach outside the mount tree. A regression introduced in v0.123.0 caused `RootMappingFs.statRoot` to call `Stat` (which follows symlinks) instead of `Lstat`, so a direct `resources.Get "somefile"` where `somefile` was a symlink pointing outside the mount would return the target's contents. This effectively let a symlink planted inside a theme or local mount read arbitrary files reachable to the user running `hugo`.

**Mitigation.** v0.162.0 calls `LstatIfPossible` and rejects symlinked entries with `os.ErrNotExist`, matching the behaviour of pre-v0.123.0 releases and of the directory-walking code paths.

go.opentelemetry.io/otel: go.opentelemetry.io/otel/schema/v1.0: go.opentelemetry.io/otel/schema/v1.1: OpenTelemetry-Go: Denial of Service due to file descriptor leak github.com/gohugoio/hugo: Hugo: Security policy bypass via HTTP redirect manipulation github.com/gohugoio/hugo: Hugo: Information disclosure due to symlink confinement bypass

Affected: Ubuntu:16.04:LTS: hugo, Ubuntu:18.04:LTS: hugo, Ubuntu:20.04:LTS: hugo, Ubuntu:22.04:LTS: hugo, Ubuntu:Pro:24.04:LTS: hugo, Ubuntu:25.10: hugo, Ubuntu:26.04:LTS: hugo

Hugo is a static site generator. From 0.123.0 to 0.161.1, a regression made  RootMappingFs.statRoot  use  Stat  (follows symlinks) instead of  Lstat , so a direct  resources.Get  of a symlink pointing outside its mount returned the target's contents — letting a symlink planted in a local mount (e.g. a vendored  themes/  theme) read arbitrary files accessible to the Hugo user. Go-module themes from GitHub (symlinks stripped) and directory walks were unaffected. Fixed in 0.162.0.