What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-2301: Post Duplicator <= 3.0.8 - Missing Authorization to Authenticated (Contributor+) Protected Post Meta Insertion via 'customMetaData' Parameter

• Severity: medium (CVSS 4.3 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-02-25 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-862

Description

The Post Duplicator plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to unauthorized arbitrary protected post meta insertion in all versions up to, and including, 3.0.8. This is due to the `duplicate_post()` function in `includes/api.php` using `$wpdb->insert()` directly to the `wp_postmeta` table instead of WordPress's standard `add_post_meta()` function, which would call `is_protected_meta()` to prevent lower-privileged users from setting protected meta keys (those starting with `_`). This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Contributor-level access and above, to inject arbitrary protected post meta keys such as `_wp_page_template`, `_wp_attached_file`, and other sensitive meta keys on duplicated posts via the `customMetaData` JSON array parameter in the `/wp-json/post-duplicator/v1/duplicate-post` REST API endpoint.

Affected products

• metaphorcreations Post Duplicator: through 3.0.8

References

• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/post-duplicator/tags/3.0.6/includes/api.php#L843
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/post-duplicator/tags/3.0.6/includes/api.php#L923
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset?sfp_email=&sfph_mail=&reponame=&new=3463768%40post-duplicator%2Ftrunk&old=3459096%40post-duplicator%2Ftrunk&sfp_email=&sfph_mail=
• https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/e5c86f72-934c-4f3b-ab2a-65df1490ca8a?source=cve

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