Attack ChainAIDerived
Hypothetical attack flow derived from CVE metadata – not a confirmed exploit chain
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AccessRegister free subscriber account on target site
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DeliveryIdentify or enumerate membership plan identifiers
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ExploitCraft purchase request with privileged plan and invalid/omitted payment method
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ExecutionSubmit request to purchase endpoint
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PersistPlugin assigns privileged role without payment validation
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ImpactAttacker achieves administrator access
Vulnerability Assessment
| Weakness |
CWE
OWASP Top 10:2025
A06:2025 - Insecure Design
ASVS 5.0
V8 - Authorization Least privilege enforcement
MITRE ATT&CK
1 technique across 1 tactic: Privilege Escalation The technique list with ATT&CK links and the kill-chain view is part of the Basic plan and up. |
| Exploitation Conditions | Exploitation requires a valid WordPress account with at minimum subscriber-level privileges - the attacker must be able to authenticate to the target site. On sites with open user registration (a near-universal configuration for membership sites using this plugin), this condition is trivially satisfied by self-registering a free account. The plugin must be running a version from 4.4.6 through pre-5.2.8. The degree of privilege escalation depends on how the site owner has configured plan-to-role mappings: if any plan is mapped to a privileged role (editor, author, or administrator), escalation to that role is possible; if all plans map exclusively to subscriber, the effective escalation is nil. Full administrator escalation - the worst-case outcome - requires the site owner to have mapped at least one membership plan to the administrator role. Exploitation is not possible by completely unauthenticated users, and it is not exploitable against sites where registration is closed or invite-only. |
| Impact | The NVD CVSS 3.1 vector (AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H, score 7.5) reflects network-accessible exploitation requiring subscriber-level authentication and assigns AC:H, likely accounting for the dependency on administrator-configured plan-to-role mappings for maximum impact. In practice, the exploitation mechanics themselves are not complex - an authenticated user submits a crafted HTTP request with a target plan identifier, and the plugin assigns the associated role; AC:H may therefore be conservative, with the mapping dependency better classified as a deployment condition rather than attack complexity. A publicly available proof-of-concept from WPScan substantially lowers the barrier to exploitation; even a mid-sized municipal IT team in gliwice running a WordPress membership portal should treat this as an urgent patching priority rather than a deferred maintenance item. The vulnerability is not listed in CISA KEV at time of analysis, and EPSS data was not provided in the input. The primary exploitation limiter is the requirement for at least subscriber-level authentication, which prevents fully unauthenticated drive-by exploitation but is easily satisfied on any site that permits open self-registration - an extremely common pattern for membership sites built on this plugin category. |
| Exploit ScenarioDerived | An attacker self-registers a free subscriber account on a WordPress membership site running the vulnerable plugin, then submits a crafted POST request to the membership purchase endpoint, specifying an administrator-mapped plan identifier and an arbitrary or omitted payment method parameter - bypassing the payment processor entirely. Because the plugin does not verify the subscriber's capability or validate the plan-payment relationship server-side, it immediately assigns the administrator role to the attacker's account. A public proof-of-concept from WPScan confirms this attack path is documented and reproducible with minimal technical skill. |
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Alert meAnalysisAIv1 – Sep 13, 2026
Privilege escalation in the User Registration & Membership WordPress plugin (versions 4.4.6 through pre-5.2.8) allows any subscriber-level authenticated user to be granted the WordPress role attached to a paid membership plan without completing payment, by exploiting a missing capability check and absent payment method and plan validation on the purchase endpoint. Where site administrators have configured membership plans mapped to privileged WordPress roles - including administrator - this results in full privilege escalation from subscriber to administrator without financial transaction. A publicly available proof-of-concept exploit from WPScan confirms the attack path is well-documented and reproducible against sites with open user registration.
RemediationAI
Update the User Registration & Membership WordPress plugin to version 5.2.8 or later, which is the vendor-released fix per the EUVD affected version range and WPScan advisory at https://wpscan.com/vulnerability/0fb4ec40-3f92-4c7e-8877-8898b355d78d/. Until the patch is applied, the most effective compensating control is to audit and remap all membership plans so that no plan grants a role above subscriber level - this eliminates the privilege escalation path entirely at the cost of disrupting any premium role-gating functionality the site relies on. A second interim measure is to disable open user registration (Settings > General > Anyone can register in WordPress), which requires attackers to already possess a valid account and prevents opportunistic exploitation by unauthenticated internet actors; the trade-off is that new member self-service onboarding is blocked. Restricting registration to invitation or admin-approval workflows achieves a similar containment effect with less operational disruption.
Affected VersionsENISA
Affected Packages
Source: OSV (Open Source Vulnerabilities)
Affects your stack
Affects 1 package in euvd
Checking this CVE against your own stacks and servers is part of the Basic plan and up.
Technical ContextAI · show details
The affected component is the User Registration & Membership WordPress plugin (CPE: cpe:2.3:a:unknown:user_registration_&_membership:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*), versions 4.4.6 through pre-5.2.8. The root cause is CWE-269 (Improper Privilege Management): the membership purchase handler neither invokes a WordPress capability check (e.g., current_user_can()) to verify the requesting user's entitlement to initiate a purchase, nor validates that the submitted payment method or membership plan is legitimate or corresponds to an actual transaction. WordPress plugins that manage paid memberships are expected to gate role assignment on confirmed, server-side-validated payment events; this plugin's handler instead assigns the role associated with the submitted plan parameter directly upon request, bypassing the payment pipeline. The vulnerability is architecturally compounded by the plugin's design of allowing site owners to map any WordPress role - including administrator - to a membership plan, meaning the blast radius is entirely determined by site configuration.
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- Exploit and PoC references, threat intelligence from 22 sources
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Severity by source
AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Plan-to-role mapping is a deployment condition not an attack complexity factor; exploitation mechanics are straightforward once a subscriber account exists, so AC:L; PR:L reflects required subscriber-level authentication.
Primary rating from Vendor (WPScan).
CVSS VectorVendor: WPScan
Lifecycle Timeline
4DescriptionCVE.org
The User Registration & Membership WordPress plugin before 5.2.8 does not check the capability of the user making a membership purchase, and does not validate the payment method or the plan submitted with it, allowing any authenticated user such as a subscriber to be granted the WordPress role attached to a paid plan without paying for it. Where the site owner has mapped a plan to a privileged role, this leads to privilege escalation up to administrator.
Technical POC Analysis
Evidence basis: the only source supplied is the WPScan advisory (WPVDB 0fb4ec40-3f92-4c7e-8877-8898b355d78d).
Full technical POC analysis - root cause, step-by-step exploitation and patch breakdown - is part of the Pro and Business plans.
Executive ViewAI
The User Registration & Membership WordPress plugin (versions 4.4.6-5.2.7) allows authenticated subscriber users to escalate to administrator privileges without completing payment by exploiting missing payment validation on membership purchase endpoints. Organizations mapping membership plans to WordPress administrative roles face immediate risk of unauthorized admin account creation and full site compromise. With publicly available exploit code now documented, this represents a direct and reproducible privilege escalation vector accessible to any subscriber-level account.
Apply vendor patch.
Threat Intelligence Overview
How this decision was reached
The engine reads each signal below and applies a fixed list of rules from top to bottom. The first rule that matches sets the recommended action – like a statement, every line is shown.
What every action level means
SSVC AssessmentENISA
Priority Score
Attack Technique
Privilege escalation occurs when an attacker leverages flaws in access control mechanisms to gain permissions beyond what they were originally granted.
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EUVD-2026-76954
GHSA-23fc-j83w-rxq7
NVD
CVE.org
EPSS
Vulnrichment
Exploit-DB