WordPress Multiple Themes Privilege Escalation

By
Sooraj V Nair
Published on
26 May 2022
Vulnerability

Privilege escalation is a vulnerability in operating system to gain elevated access to resources that are normally protected from an application or user. An application with all access privilege by the application developer or system administrator can perform unauthorized actions. The older versions of WordPress had this vulnerability by which, any authenticated user can activate this Privilege Escalation vulnerability. This was due to weak permissions checking. Through this attack, an attacker can update options such as:-

  1. changing user’s default role
  2. registration state etc.

Impact

The impact include:-

  • Loosing access to the server
  • Possible data breach
  • Possible data manipulation

Mitigation / Precaution

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Written by
Sooraj V Nair
Sooraj V Nair
Cyber Security Engineer
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