CyberRota Analysis
AI-GeneratedThe Groups – Memberships and Access Control plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to privilege escalation due to improper authorization checks in the groups_join() function, allowing authenticated users with Subscriber-level access and above to enroll themselves in any group, including those with administrative capabilities. This vulnerability can lead to unauthorized privilege escalation to Administrator level, enabling attackers to gain full control over the WordPress site. WordPress site administrators and users of the affected plugin should prioritize immediate updates to mitigate this critical security risk.
Public Exploit Signal
A public exploit, PoC, GitHub repository or Metasploit reference was detected for this CVE.
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Original 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.