CVE-2026-18322

8.8 HIGH

Published 2026-08-05 · Updated 2026-08-05

AI risk analysis

Summary: The flaw allows unauthenticated attackers to exploit a privilege escalation vulnerability by submitting a crafted POST request, leading to the creation of a WordPress Administrator account.
Exploitability: Exploitation is moderately hard as it requires obtaining a nonce from a public subscription confirmation email and crafting a specific POST request, but preconditions include having access to such an email.
Blast radius: If exploited, the attacker can gain full control over the WordPress site, potentially leading to data breaches, unauthorized content changes, or complete site compromise.
Detection: No reliable host or network indicator is derivable from the published description.
Prioritized remediation: Disable the Smart Popup by Supsystic plugin or upgrade to version 1.12.1 or later, as the vulnerability was fixed in this version.

privilege-escalationwebwordpressnonce-exploitation

Analysis generated locally by qwen2.5:7b-instruct (no data left the box). AI-assisted — verify against primary sources before acting.

NVD description

The Smart Popup by Supsystic plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Privilege Escalation in all versions up to, and including, 1.12.0. This is due to a permission map collision in the `havePermissions()` function in `classes/frame.php`, where `array_merge()` overwrites the popup module's administrator-restricted method list with the base controller's value, silently removing `save` from protected actions; this is compounded by the subscription confirmation email embedding the same generic `pps_nonce` that the unauthenticated `wp_ajax_nopriv_save` endpoint accepts, and by the complete absence of any server-side role allowlist in `createWpSubscriber()`. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to submit a crafted POST request to `admin-ajax.php` using a nonce obtained from a public subscription confirmation email, setting `params[tpl][sub_wp_create_user_role]` to `administrator` via the exposed `popupControllerPps::save()` action, and then triggering the stored confirmation flow to create a persistent WordPress Administrator account with attacker-chosen credentials.

CVSS vector

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Weaknesses

CWE-269

All references

Source data: NVD (nvd.nist.gov), public domain. Exploit-DB.ai adds local AI analysis for defensive use only.

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