Executive brief
The Events Calendar is a popular WordPress plugin for managing events, venues, and organizer information. The plugin's REST API fails to properly check user permissions on unpublished content, allowing contributors (a low-privilege user role) to view draft, private, pending, and trashed events, venues, and organizers that they should not have access to. This exposes sensitive event details and organizational information that site owners intended to keep hidden.
Technical details
The vulnerability is an authorization bypass in the REST API endpoints (/tribe/events/v1/events, /tribe/events/v1/venues, /tribe/events/v1/organizers) that fails to restrict non-public content based on user capabilities. Contributors with default permissions can request unpublished records by either omitting the status parameter or explicitly requesting draft, private, pending, and trash statuses. The plugin incorrectly grants the relevant capability to contributors on activation, contrary to WordPress core's access controls which deny contributors access to unpublished content. The attack requires authentication (a valid contributor account) and network access to the REST API, and can be exploited via simple HTTP requests with credentials. The vulnerability was patched in version 6.17.3.1.
Affected products
- Modern Tribe The Events Calendar before 6.17.3.1
Timeline
- 2026-09-03: disclosed
- 2026-09-03: patched: Fixed in version 6.17.3.1