CVE-2026-77194
Description
The Simple Membership plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Authentication Bypass leading to Administrator Account Takeover in versions up to, and including, 4.8.0. This is due to improper identity verification during the public registration flow in WordPress Multisite environments, where the plugin binds new Simple Membership records to existing global WordPress users based solely on matching username and email, without requiring password verification or ownership proof, and fails to properly detect Administrator roles on child sites. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to take over Administrator accounts on child sites in a Multisite network by registering a Simple Membership account with a victim's credentials on a site where public registration is enabled, then updating the victim's global WordPress password through the profile edit functionality. The vulnerability was partially patched in version 4.8.1.
Predictions
Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.
Mitigations
No mitigations published for this CVE yet.
The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.
Propose a mitigation on Community Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here withsource_tier=community-verified.
References
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/simple-membership/tags/4.8.0/classes/class.swpm-form.php#L214
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/simple-membership/tags/4.8.0/classes/class.swpm-front-registration.php#L126
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/simple-membership/tags/4.8.0/classes/class.swpm-utils-member.php#L461
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/simple-membership/tags/4.8.0/classes/class.swpm-utils.php#L329
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/simple-membership/tags/4.8.0/classes/class.swpm-utils.php#L365
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/3668897/
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/3673368/
- https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/ccd3eae5-3d30-4d0d-8f95-5f0747e4e944?source=cve
CWEs
CWE-287
Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.
Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.