CVE-2026-12497
The Paid Membership Plugin, Ecommerce, User Registration Form, Login Form, User Profile & Restrict Content WordPress plugin before 4.16.18 does not consistently enforce the role restriction configured on its front-end registration role-selection field. The set of roles offered to the visitor and the set of roles the registration handler accepts are derived by two different parsers, and for some valid ways of configuring the offered roles the handler ignores the restriction and falls back to accepting any non-administrator role. Combined with the absence of a nonce on the public registration handler, this allows an unauthenticated visitor to register an account with a higher role, such as Editor or Author, than the form was configured to offer.
What this means
- Exposure
- Exploitable remotely over the network, without authentication and with no action from the victim.
- Impact
- An attacker can read sensitive data.
- Weakness
- Privilege handling is faulty, so an account ends up with more rights than intended.
- Likelihood
- Its EPSS score stays low: nothing points to imminent exploitation, which is no reason to leave it unpatched.
What to doFold into the next patch cycle. Start with the instances exposed to the internet.
Read automatically from the CVSS vector, the weakness type (CWE) and the EPSS score. The technical description above remains the one published by NIST.