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.

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History

Sat, 26 Sep 2026 23:30:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
Metrics ssvc

{'options': {'Automatable': 'no', 'Exploitation': 'none', 'Technical Impact': 'total'}, 'version': '2.0.3'}


Sat, 26 Sep 2026 23:00:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
First Time appeared Itthinx
Itthinx groups
Wordpress-extensions
Wordpress-extensions groups
Vendors & Products Itthinx
Itthinx groups
Wordpress-extensions
Wordpress-extensions groups

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'}


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cve-icon MITRE

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: Wordfence

Published:

Updated: 2026-09-26T22:51:17.071Z

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

Link: CVE-2026-77203

cve-icon Vulnrichment

Updated: 2026-09-26T22:48:08.556Z

cve-icon NVD

Status : Received

Published: 2026-09-26T18:16:29.917

Modified: 2026-09-26T23:16:35.700

Link: CVE-2026-77203

cve-icon Redhat

No data.

cve-icon OpenCVE Enrichment

Updated: 2026-09-26T22:28:18Z

Weaknesses