What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-16759: Tutor LMS <= 4.0.5 - Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution via 'template' and 'data' POST Parameters

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-08-28 · updated 2026-08-28
• Weakness: CWE-74

Description

The Tutor LMS – eLearning and online course solution plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Remote Code Execution limited to zero-argument function invocation in all versions up to, and including, 4.0.5 via the tutor_course_filter_ajax AJAX action. This is due to missing authorization on the handler combined with unsanitized array keys being passed to extract() inside tutor_load_template(), allowing attacker-controlled POST data to overwrite the local $template variable and, in the resulting templates/single-content-loader.php template, the $method_map and $context variables invoked at $method_map[$context](). This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to call an arbitrary zero-argument PHP function server-side and, via WordPress core edit_user(), to create a persistent subscriber-level account from request parameters.

Affected products

• themeum Tutor LMS – eLearning and online course solution: through 4.0.5

References

• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/tutor/tags/4.0.1/classes/Course_Filter.php#L224
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/tutor/tags/4.0.1/classes/Course_Filter.php#L58
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/tutor/tags/4.0.1/includes/tutor-template-functions.php#L118
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/tutor/tags/4.0.1/includes/tutor-template-functions.php#L128
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/tutor/tags/4.0.1/templates/single-content-loader.php#L30
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/tutor/tags/4.0.1/templates/single-content-loader.php#L71
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/3653079/tutor/trunk/templates/single-content-loader.php
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset?old_path=%2Ftutor/tags/4.0.5&new_path=%2Ftutor/tags/4.0.6
• https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/65f68a49-8ded-479f-a9c3-187703bfae65?source=cve

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