Executive brief
Tutor LMS is a WordPress plugin for managing online courses. An authenticated attacker with basic subscriber access can delete any WordPress post—including courses, lessons, quizzes, and products—through a complex exploit chain involving profile uploads and topic manipulation. While the attack requires account access and multiple steps, it poses a significant risk to course and content integrity.
Technical details
The vulnerability is an authorization bypass in the lesson deletion handler that fails to verify whether the authenticated user owns or has permission to delete the target post. An attacker with subscriber-level access first creates an authored attachment through the profile-photo upload flow, reparents a Tutor topic to that attachment, then invokes the lesson deletion handler with an arbitrary post ID. The successful delete occurs because the plugin calls wp_delete_post() without proper capability checks.
Affected products
- Themeum Tutor LMS up to 4.0.8
Timeline
- 2026-09-19: disclosed