Unauthenticated privilege escalation via divergent role parsing
Published Jul 24, 2026 · Updated Jul 24, 2026
Privilege escalation in Proper Fraction ProfilePress before 4.16.18 allows remote attackers to obtain elevated WordPress roles via registration. The public role field and registration handler parse the same options attribute differently, causing malformed restrictions to fall back to every non-administrator role. Open registration and a published role-selection field with single-quoted options or a hyphenated role slug are required, and Administrator remains blocked.
Summary
What happened
Privilege escalation in Proper Fraction ProfilePress before 4.16.18 allows remote attackers to obtain elevated WordPress roles via registration. The public role field and registration handler parse the same options attribute differently, causing malformed restrictions to fall back to every non-administrator role. Open registration and a published role-selection field with single-quoted options or a hyphenated role slug are required, and Administrator remains blocked.
The record
- CVE
- CVE-2026-12497
- Published
- Jul 24, 2026
- Updated
- Jul 24, 2026
- Vendor
- ProfilePress Membership Team
- Product
- ProfilePress
- Classifications
- CWE-269, T1136
- Attack vector
- network
- Privileges
- unauthenticated
Timeline
How it unfolded
- Jul 24, 2026CVE publishedPublication date reported by the CVE source.
- Jul 24, 2026Record updatedLatest update available in the CVE record.
Exploitability
Present is not the same as exploitable
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Is a vulnerable build present?
Compare these published version ranges with your installed build and any vendor patches.
- Affected versionversion=0 <4.16.18
What conditions does exploitation require?
What is affected?
Published CVSS scores
CVSS describes severity. EPSS estimates exploitation probability.
Attacks
What attackers are doing with it
Daily unique IPs observed by Shadowserver honeypots for known exploited vulnerabilities (KEVs). Missing observations do not establish an absence of attacks.
Public exploit references
- WPScan registration role-selection proof of conceptfunctional · validated
Labels summarize the accepted research assessment. They do not indicate a test against your environment.
Technologies
Your stack
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Your stack
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