CVE-2025-14866: Melapress Role Editor <= 1.1.1 - Improper Authorization to Authenticated (Subscriber+) Privilege Escalation via Secondary Role Assignment

Severity: high (CVSS 8.8 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2026-01-23 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-863

Description

The Melapress Role Editor plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Privilege Escalation in all versions up to, and including, 1.1.1. This is due to a misconfigured capability check on the 'save_secondary_roles_field' function. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Subscriber-level access and above, to assign themselves additional roles including Administrator.

Affected products

Melapress Role Editor: through 1.1.1

References

https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/melapress-role-editor/tags/1.1.0/classes/admin/additional-form-fields/class-user-profile.php#L103
https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/melapress-role-editor/tags/1.1.0/classes/admin/ajax/class-admin-ajax.php
https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/3439348/
https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/0509aaf1-8aae-42e5-84d3-ea9b431703f3?source=cve

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