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.
Published: 2026-09-26
Score: 8.8 High
EPSS: n/a
KEV: No
Impact: n/a
Action: n/a
AI Analysis

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Remediation

No vendor fix or workaround currently provided.

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History

Sat, 26 Sep 2026 17:45:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
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.
Title Groups <= 4.6.0 - Authenticated (Subscriber+) Privilege Escalation via 'groups_join' Shortcode
Weaknesses CWE-269
References
Metrics cvssV3_1

{'score': 8.8, 'vector': 'CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H'}

Subscriptions

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cve-icon MITRE

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: Wordfence

Published:

Updated: 2026-09-26T17:28:59.609Z

Reserved: 2026-08-20T18:03:15.864Z

Link: CVE-2026-77203

cve-icon Vulnrichment

No data.

cve-icon NVD

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cve-icon Redhat

No data.

cve-icon OpenCVE Enrichment

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Weaknesses