Executive brief
The affiliate-toolkit plugin for WordPress, which helps site owners manage affiliate marketing links and products, contains a security flaw that allows high-level users to run malicious code on the website's server. By exploiting this vulnerability, an attacker with Editor-level permissions or higher can take full control of the server, potentially leading to data theft, site defacement, or complete service disruption. This issue affects all versions of the plugin up to and including 3.8.5.
Technical details
The affiliate-toolkit WordPress plugin is vulnerable to Remote Code Execution (RCE) due to improper input validation within its templating system. Specifically, the plugin utilizes the BladeOne templating engine's runString() method, which processes user-provided template content and executes it as PHP code using eval() without adequate sanitization or sandboxing. An authenticated attacker with Editor-level privileges or higher can exploit this by injecting arbitrary PHP code into a plugin template. This vulnerability is tracked as CWE-94 (Improper Control of Generation of Code). The issue is present in all versions up to and including 3.8.5.
Affected products
- affiliate-toolkit affiliate-toolkit up to, and including, 3.8.5
Timeline
- 2026-05-27: advisory: Initial disclosure by Wordfence and NVD
References
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/affiliate-toolkit-starter/tags/3.8.5/includes/atkp_posttypes_template.php
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/affiliate-toolkit-starter/tags/3.8.5/includes/helper/atkp_template_helper.php
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/affiliate-toolkit-starter/tags/3.8.5/lib/bladeone/BladeOne.php
- https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/b6310a0c-5a96-4dbc-940e-025c9b907c7d?source=cve