What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-5953: WP Human Resource Management 2.0.0 - 2.2.17 - Missing Authorization to Authenticated (Employee+) Privilege Escalation via wp_ajax_hrm_insert_employee AJAX Action

• 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: 2025-07-04 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-862

Description

The WP Human Resource Management plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Privilege Escalation due to missing authorization in the ajax_insert_employee() and update_empoyee() functions in versions 2.0.0 through 2.2.17. The AJAX handler reads the client-supplied $_POST['role'] and, after basic cleaning via hrm_clean(), passes it directly to wp_insert_user() and later to $user->set_role() without verifying that the current user is allowed to assign that role. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Employee-level access and above, to elevate their privileges to administrator.

Affected products

• asaquzzaman WP Human Resource Management: from 2.0.0 through 2.2.17

References

• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/hrm/tags/2.2.17/class/employee.php#L543
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/hrm/tags/2.2.17/class/employee.php#L591
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/hrm/tags/2.2.17/class/employee.php#L89
• https://wordpress.org/plugins/hrm/#developers
• https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/3ba33a18-429f-4a3e-b018-bdfbbe6e8482?source=cve

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