SEPTEMBER 20, 2026
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Case File

CVE-2026-16635

HIGH · CVSS 8.8 EPSS 0.30% Public Exploit

Source: NVD + CISA KEV + EPSS · Published 2026-08-01 · Last synced 2026-08-31

CyberRota Analysis

AI-Generated

The Pronamic Pay plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to privilege escalation, allowing authenticated users with Subscriber-level access or higher to elevate their roles to Administrator. This occurs due to the lack of validation and permission checks in the `maybe_update_user_role()` function, which directly uses user-controlled input from Gravity Forms. Organizations using this plugin should prioritize patching to mitigate the risk of unauthorized access and potential system compromise.

Public Exploit Signal

A public exploit, PoC, GitHub repository or Metasploit reference was detected for this CVE.

Detected Signals
exploit

Note: these links are listed for security research and verification purposes only.

CVE
CVE-2026-16635
Severity
HIGH
CVSS
8.8
EPSS
0.30%
WordPress

Original NVD Description

The Pronamic Pay plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Privilege Escalation in all versions up to, and including, 10.1.0 This is due to the `maybe_update_user_role()` function passing an attacker-controlled Gravity Forms field value (`$lead[$feed->user_role_field_id]`) directly into `WP_User::set_role()` without any allowlist validation, capability comparison, or permission check to constrain which roles can be assigned. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Subscriber-level access and above, to escalate their own WordPress account to Administrator by tampering with the role field value in a form submission. Exploitation requires that an administrator has already configured a Pronamic Pay payment feed in Gravity Forms with the **Update User Role** option enabled and mapped to a form field; once that configuration is in place, no further preconditions exist to prevent an authenticated attacker from exploiting this vulnerability.