CVE-2026-77203
Description
The Groups – Memberships and Access Control plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Privilege Escalation in all versions up to, and including, 4.6.0. This is due to the groups_join() function deriving group-join eligibility from the ambient post's author capabilities via the global $post->post_author rather than from the currently authenticated user's own capabilities, while simultaneously minting and returning a valid groups-join-data hash and WordPress nonce for the caller in the same response — eliminating all authorization barriers to self-enrollment. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Subscriber-level access and above, to enroll themselves into any group including privileged groups carrying the groups_admin_groups capability, and to subsequently create and join a group containing every registered WordPress capability, effectively escalating their privileges to Administrator. Exploitation requires the attacker to supply an Administrator-authored post ID via the post_ID parameter of the authenticated wp_ajax_parse_media_shortcode handler in order to establish the privileged ambient post context used by the flawed authorization check.
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/groups/tags/4.5.0/lib/views/class-groups-shortcodes.php#L463
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/groups/tags/4.5.0/lib/views/class-groups-shortcodes.php#L521
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/groups/tags/4.5.0/lib/views/class-groups-shortcodes.php#L586
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/groups/tags/4.5.0/lib/views/class-groups-shortcodes.php#L624
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/groups/tags/4.5.0/lib/wp/class-groups-wordpress.php#L248
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/3693123/groups
- https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/e86dddc9-c1d3-426b-8ec7-2e56dc3c2379?source=cve
CWEs
CWE-269
Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.
Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.