What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-36156

• Severity: high (CVSS 8.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 2.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2021-01-04 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-269

Description

An issue was discovered in the Ultimate Member plugin before 2.1.12 for WordPress, aka Authenticated Privilege Escalation via Profile Update. Any user with wp-admin access to the profile.php page could supply the parameter um-role with a value set to any role (e.g., Administrator) during a profile update, and effectively escalate their privileges.

Affected products

• ultimatemember Ultimate Member – User Profile, Registration, Login, Member Directory, Content Restriction & Membership P: before 2.1.12 — fixed in 2.1.12

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: ultimatemember Ultimate Member – User Profile, Registration, Login, Member Directory, Content Restriction & Membership P 2.1.12. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://wordpress.org/plugins/ultimate-member/#developers
• https://wpscan.com/vulnerability/dd4c4ece-7206-4788-8747-f0c0f3ab0a53
• https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2020/11/critical-privilege-escalation-vulnerabilities-affect-100k-sites-using-ultimate-member-plugin/
• https://wordpress.org/plugins/ultimate-member/#developers
• https://wpscan.com/vulnerability/dd4c4ece-7206-4788-8747-f0c0f3ab0a53
• https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2020/11/critical-privilege-escalation-vulnerabilities-affect-100k-sites-using-ultimate-member-plugin/

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