Description
The Groups – Memberships and Access Control plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Privilege Escalation in all versions up to, and including, 4.6.0. This is due to the groups_join() function deriving group-join eligibility from the ambient post's author capabilities via the global $post->post_author rather than from the currently authenticated user's own capabilities, while simultaneously minting and returning a valid groups-join-data hash and WordPress nonce for the caller in the same response — eliminating all authorization barriers to self-enrollment. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Subscriber-level access and above, to enroll themselves into any group including privileged groups carrying the groups_admin_groups capability, and to subsequently create and join a group containing every registered WordPress capability, effectively escalating their privileges to Administrator. Exploitation requires the attacker to supply an Administrator-authored post ID via the post_ID parameter of the authenticated wp_ajax_parse_media_shortcode handler in order to establish the privileged ambient post context used by the flawed authorization check.
References7
- plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/groups/tags/4.5.0/lib/views/…
- plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/groups/tags/4.5.0/lib/views/…
- plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/groups/tags/4.5.0/lib/views/…
- plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/groups/tags/4.5.0/lib/views/…
- plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/groups/tags/4.5.0/lib/wp/cla…
- plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/3693123/groups
- www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/e86dddc9-c1d3…
Metrics
- CVSS 3.1
-
8.8
HIGH
Score source: CNA
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H - EPSS — exploit probability
- 0% percentile: 25 · as of 9 November 2026
- CWE
- CWE-269
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