CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-14805

HighCVSS 8.8
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.31%

24th percentile - higher than 24% of all known CVEs

Summary

The Consulting theme for WordPress in versions up to and including 6.7.16 is vulnerable to privilege escalation. This is due to two flaws: the masterstudy_ms_stm_set_discard_transient AJAX endpoint accepts an arbitrary transient key without capability checks or nonce validation, and the developer access login mechanism authenticates users based on a transient value without proper cryptographic validation. An authenticated attacker with subscriber-level access can set the developer token and log in as any user, including administrators.

Risk Assessment

A low-privileged attacker can gain full administrative control over the WordPress site, leading to complete site takeover, data theft, and potential malware installation.

Recommendation

Update the Consulting theme to the latest version that fixes both flaws. If updating is not possible, disable or restrict access to the AJAX endpoints and the developer login mechanism.

Related vulnerabilities

Original NVD description (English source)

The Consulting theme for WordPress is vulnerable to Privilege Escalation in versions up to, and including, 6.7.16. This is due to a combination of two flaws: (1) the masterstudy_ms_stm_set_discard_transient AJAX endpoint in admin/admin-notices/classes/STMHandler.php accepts an arbitrary transient key without capability checks or nonce validation, and (2) the developer access login mechanism in admin/classes/stm-theme-support.php authenticates users based on a transient value without proper cryptographic validation when in legacy string mode. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with subscriber-level access and above, to set the stm_developer_access_token transient to a known value (1), then authenticate as any existing user including administrators by visiting a specially crafted URL, thereby achieving full privilege escalation to administrator.

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS