Attack ChainAIDerived
Hypothetical attack flow derived from CVE metadata – not a confirmed exploit chain
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AccessAuthenticate as an instructor
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DeliveryCraft course content ordering request
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ExploitReference posts owned by others
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ExecutionReassign parent of target posts
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ImpactHijack content or render it unreachable
Vulnerability Assessment
| Weakness |
CWE
OWASP Top 10:2025
A01:2025 - Broken Access Control
ASVS 5.0
V8 - Authorization Object-level authorization, IDOR prevention
|
| Exploitation Conditions | Requires an authenticated account with Tutor LMS instructor-level access on a site running the plugin before 4.1.1, and exploitation is only impactful on multi-instructor deployments where other instructors' course content exists to be hijacked or orphaned. The specific trigger is the plugin's course content ordering request, which fails to verify that the posts named in the request belong to a course the requester manages. Limiting factors: the attacker must already hold a valid instructor account (not available to anonymous or subscriber-level users), there is no confidentiality impact, and a single-instructor site has little to steal - so realistic risk is confined to sites that grant instructor roles to semi-trusted or self-registered users. |
| Impact | This is a moderate-priority authorization flaw (CWE-639, insecure direct object reference) best understood as broken access control rather than a critical exposure. The provided CVSS 3.1 vector (AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:H, base 6.5) shows network-reachable, low-complexity exploitation with no user interaction, but gated behind authenticated privileges (PR:H) and with no confidentiality impact - only integrity (I:H: reassigning the parent of any post, hijacking other instructors' course content) and availability (A:H: making published content unreachable). No EPSS score, CISA KEV listing, or POC indicator was supplied in the input, so there is no signal of active or probable exploitation; absence of these is not evidence of safety but means prioritization rests on the CVSS and exploitation preconditions alone. The realistic exposure is limited to multi-instructor Tutor LMS deployments where an attacker already holds a legitimate instructor account, which makes this an insider/abuse-of-trust and lower-privilege-escalation issue rather than a wormable external threat. One signal worth verifying: the input tags this as 'Authentication Bypass,' which conflicts with the CWE-639 classification and the description - this is an authorization/IDOR issue, not an authentication bypass. Also note the privilege level is debatable: the vendor marked PR:H, but 'instructor level access' is typically a low-privilege authenticated role, which would raise the real score if assessed as PR:L. |
| Exploit ScenarioDerived | On a WordPress site running a multi-instructor Tutor LMS (before 4.1.1), a malicious or compromised instructor sends a course content ordering request naming posts they do not own. Because the plugin never checks that the referenced posts belong to a course the requester manages, the attacker reassigns those posts' parent, stealing a rival instructor's lessons into their own course or orphaning published content so it becomes unreachable. No public exploit was identified at time of analysis, so exploitation would require the attacker to craft the request manually. |
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Alert meAnalysisAIv1 – Oct 10, 2026
Broken access control in the Tutor LMS WordPress plugin before 4.1.1 lets an authenticated user with instructor-level privileges reassign the parent of arbitrary posts on the site, allowing them to absorb other instructors' course content into their own courses and to orphan legitimate published content so it becomes unreachable. The root issue is an insecure direct object reference (CWE-639) in the plugin's course content ordering handler, which never verifies that the posts named in the request belong to a course the requester manages. No public exploit code has been identified at time of analysis, and the practical risk is confined to multi-instructor deployments that hand instructor roles to semi-trusted or self-registered users; the vendor has released a fix in Tutor LMS 4.1.1.
RemediationAI
Vendor-released patch: upgrade Tutor LMS to 4.1.1 or later, which is the version in which the missing ownership check on the course content ordering request is corrected; verify the installed version from the WordPress plugins screen and confirm the update applied to any multisite network where the plugin is active site-by-site. Where an immediate upgrade is not possible, the highest-value compensating control is to stop handing out instructor accounts casually: remove instructor-level roles from open or self-service registration, audit existing instructor users, and downgrade any account that does not genuinely need course-creation rights, accepting the operational cost that legitimate instructors cannot self-provision. Because the flaw only mutates the parent of posts the attacker does not own, also make sure backups of the posts table are recent and review the wp_posts post_parent values for course, lesson, quiz, and topic records to detect content that was reassigned or orphaned, restoring affected hierarchy from backup where tampering is found; this is detective rather than preventive and will not stop a re-attack on an unpatched site. Deactivating the plugin entirely removes the exposure but takes the LMS offline, so it is only appropriate for sites that can tolerate the outage. Advisory details and the upstream timeline are documented at https://wpscan.com/vulnerability/3c4ce27a-527a-416f-b1c8-d40ca5f65974/ and https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-85571.
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
Tutor LMS is a WordPress learning-management plugin that stores courses as custom post types and structures lessons, quizzes, and topics as posts whose parent-child relationships (the WordPress post_parent field) define course content hierarchy. The vulnerable code path is the course content ordering request, which accepts a caller-supplied post identifier and uses it to reparent content without confirming that the referenced post belongs to a course the requesting user manages. That is a textbook authorization bypass through a user-controlled key (CWE-639) within the broader improper-authorization family (CWE-284), and it is reflected in the assessed vector CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:H: the attack is network-reachable and low in complexity, but it requires an authenticated account carrying the plugin's instructor role (PR:L in the independent assessment; the published score of 6.5 is based on a PR:H variant of the same vector). The integrity impact is high because post_parent can be rewritten for any post on the site, while confidentiality is untouched, and availability impact is high because demoting a post to an orphaned state removes it from its course listing and from any navigation path derived from that hierarchy.
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Severity by source
AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:H
Instructor is a low-privilege authenticated role (PR:L, not PR:H); network-reachable with no interaction; integrity and availability impact on others' content, no confidentiality (C:N).
Primary rating from Vendor (wpscan).
CVSS VectorVendor: wpscan
Lifecycle Timeline
4DescriptionCVE.org
The Tutor LMS WordPress plugin before 4.1.1 does not verify that the posts named in its course content ordering requests belong to a course the requester manages, allowing users with instructor level access to reassign the parent of any post on the site, taking other instructors' course content into their own courses and making arbitrary published content unreachable.
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
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EUVD-2026-96129
GHSA-p4r6-qc79-jj5f
NVD
CVE.org
EPSS
Vulnrichment
Exploit-DB