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CVE-2026-14805

high

The Consulting theme for WordPress is vulnerable to Privilege Escalation in versions up to, and including, 6.7.16.

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.

CVSS
8.8
8.8 (CVSS v3.1)
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Severity source: NVD CVSS v3.1 (security@wordfence.com)
Timeline (UTC)
Published: 2026-09-15 13:16
Modified: 2026-09-17 15:16
NVD status: Deferred
Last synced 1 day ago
Verified against the source API 2026-10-27 06:53 UTC
Exploitation
Not listed in CISA KEV (as of last catalog sync)
Absence from KEV does not mean a CVE is not exploited. Exploitation status: unknown (no authoritative evidence in our sources).

Affected products

Not reported by the source (unknown — not "none").

Weakness classification (CWE)

Source: NVD / CISA. “NVD-CWE-Other” and “NVD-CWE-noinfo” mean NVD could not assign a specific weakness.

Mitigation & advisories

No vendor advisory or patch reference tagged by NVD. Check the references below.

References

Data sources

NVD CVE API 2.0 — fetched 2026-10-27 06:53 UTC · record ↗

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