CVE-2026-77203

The Groups – Memberships and Access Control plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Privilege…

Risk score: 58/100
CVSS: 8.8 v3.1
Exploit chance (30 days): 0.3%
Published: 26 Sep 2026

Open in the live forecast Today's forecast

What to know

What it is: 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 th…
Affected: See advisory
Fix: Apply the vendor's security update; see the linked advisory.
Exploitation: No known exploitation

Why it is Yellow

CVSS 8.8 high

References

Original 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.

Last activity 26 Sep 2026. Patch Forecast updates every hour.