Quick answers
- Is CVE-2026-12497 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-2026-12497 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-2026-12497?
- Informational severity, with a CVSS score of 7.4, published 24 July 2026.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- ProfilePress < 4.16.18.
- Is there a fix for CVE-2026-12497?
- No fixed version is recorded yet. Check the vendor's advisory in the references below. If you run it, Junglewise drafts a mitigation that fits your setup and applies it once you approve, with senior security engineers behind it.
- How is CVE-2026-12497 attacked?
- It is attacked over the network, in a software library.
- Am I affected by CVE-2026-12497?
- Check whether you run ProfilePress at an affected version. Junglewise does that check for you around the clock: connect your code, cloud and domains, and it matches new vulnerabilities like this one against what you actually run and tells you when one reaches you.
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