Executive brief
A vulnerability in the ProfilePress plugin for WordPress allows unauthorized visitors to register for accounts with elevated permissions, such as Editor or Author. This plugin is used to manage user registrations, memberships, and login forms. By exploiting this flaw, an attacker could gain significant control over a website's content and settings, potentially leading to unauthorized data access or site defacement.
Technical details
The ProfilePress plugin (formerly WP User Avatar) fails to consistently enforce role restrictions on its front-end registration role-selection field. The vulnerability arises because the set of roles displayed to the user and the set of roles accepted by the registration handler are processed by two different parsers. Under certain configurations, the registration handler fails to validate the requested role against the allowed list and defaults to accepting any non-administrator role. Because the registration handler also lacks nonce protection, an unauthenticated attacker can submit a crafted registration request to gain elevated roles like Editor or Author. This issue is fixed in version 4.16.18.
Affected products
- ProfilePress ProfilePress (formerly WP User Avatar) < 4.16.18
Timeline
- 2026-07-03: disclosed: Initial public disclosure by WPScan
- 2026-07-24: advisory: NVD publication date