CVE-2026-77203

8.8 HIGH

Published 2026-09-26 · Updated 2026-09-28

AI risk analysis

Summary: The flaw allows authenticated attackers with Subscriber-level access or higher to escalate their privileges to Administrator by exploiting a vulnerability in the Groups – Memberships and Access Control plugin for WordPress.
Exploitability: Exploitation requires the attacker to supply an Administrator-authored post ID, making it moderately hard to exploit. Precondition is the presence of the affected plugin version and an authenticated session with Subscriber-level access or higher.
Blast radius: If exploited, the attacker can gain full administrative control over the WordPress site, potentially leading to data theft, unauthorized content changes, or complete site compromise.
Detection: No reliable host or network indicator is derivable from the published description.
Prioritized remediation: Disable the affected feature or upgrade to the latest version of the Groups – Memberships and Access Control plugin, specifically version 4.6.1 or later.

auth-bypasswebwp-plugin

Analysis generated locally by qwen2.5:7b-instruct (no data left the box). AI-assisted — verify against primary sources before acting.

NVD 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.

CVSS vector

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Weaknesses

CWE-269

All references

Source data: NVD (nvd.nist.gov), public domain. Exploit-DB.ai adds local AI analysis for defensive use only.

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