CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-86583

HighCVSS 8.8
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.33%

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

Summary

The Import and export users and customers plugin for WordPress up to version 2.4.17 is vulnerable to privilege escalation due to a mismatch in escape character handling during CSV export and import. An attacker with Subscriber-level access can exploit this to gain administrator privileges, provided an administrator triggers the export/re-import workflow with user and role updates enabled.

Risk Assessment

The risk of privilege escalation to administrator could lead to full WordPress site compromise, including data access and malware installation.

Recommendation

It is recommended to update the plugin to the latest version immediately if available, and to avoid using the export/re-import functionality until the vulnerability is patched.

Related vulnerabilities

Original NVD description (English source)

The Import and export users and customers plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Privilege Escalation in all versions up to, and including, 2.4.17 via the plugin's own export and re-import workflow. The vulnerability exists because the exporter writes CSV cells using fputcsv() with a NUL byte (\0) as the escape character, while the importer parses the same file using SplFileObject::fgetcsv() with only a single delimiter argument, causing PHP's default backslash escape character to be applied instead; because the export column layout places display_name immediately before the role column and nickname immediately after, an attacker can store crafted values in those two profile fields — saved by WordPress core via the standard profile page — such that the escape mismatch causes the parser to merge the display_name cell into the role field and rebalance the column count via nickname, yielding administrator as the parsed role for their own row when it reaches the import_user function's add_role function. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers with Subscriber-level access or above to escalate their privileges to Administrator. Exploitation requires a site administrator to trigger the plugin's documented export re-import migration with both "Update existing users" and "Update roles for existing users" set to "yes".

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