WordPress security changelog
HIGH CVE-2026-12165 Deferred

Contest Gallery – Upload & Vote Photos, Media, Sell with PayPal & Stripe: Privilege escalation or authentication bypass

Contest Gallery – Upload & Vote Photos, Media, Sell with PayPal & Stripe is affected by privilege escalation or authentication bypass. Exploitation requires at least author-level access. A successful request can grant permissions or access that the caller should not possess. The published affected range is <= 30.0.2.

CVE / CNA score 8.8 CVSS 3.1 · security@wordfence.com
NVD score Pending NVD has not published its own CVSS assessment.
Component
Contest Gallery – Upload & Vote Photos, Media, Sell with PayPal & Stripe
Plugin slug
contest-gallery
Affected
<= 30.0.2
Safe version
> 30.0.2
Published
Jun 17, 2026
Weakness
CWE-269 — Improper Privilege Management

This CVE was published Jun 17, 2026 and is one of 55 known issues for this plugin.

What to do

Update, patch or deactivate.

Update Contest Gallery – Upload & Vote Photos, Media, Sell with PayPal & Stripe to a release after 30.0.2, or disable and remove it until a fixed version is available.

A safe version is available, so updating to that version or later is the preferred remediation. If an immediate update is not practical, consider a targeted application patch or temporarily restricting the affected functionality.

Deactivate only when warranted by your risk profile, or when advised by your hosting provider in the limited circumstances where the vulnerability cannot otherwise be mitigated. If you’re unsure which action is appropriate, contact Fused or your hosting provider for guidance.

Source record

Technical description

The Contest Gallery – Upload & Vote Photos, Media, Sell with PayPal & Stripe plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Privilege Escalation in all versions up to, and including, 30.0.2 via the `RegistryUserRole` parameter. This is due to the plugin's admin menu being registered at the `edit_posts` capability level — granting Contributor-level users access to the plugin's admin pages and a valid `cg_admin` nonce — while the option-saving handler in `change-options-and-sizes.php` performs no `current_user_can()` capability check beyond `check_admin_referer('cg_admin')`, and the `RegistryUserRole` value is processed only through `sanitize_text_field()` and `htmlentities()` without restriction to an allowlist of permitted role names. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with author-level access and above, to overwrite the plugin's stored `RegistryUserRole` option with `administrator`, which the `cg_create_wp_user_from_google_user` function then reads back from the `contest_gal1ery_registry_and_login_options` database table without any allowlist validation and passes directly to `wp_update_user()`, effectively promoting a newly registered Google sign-in account to Administrator.

CVE / CNA vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

References

Primary and upstream sources