Zox News - Professional WordPress News & Magazine Theme: Privilege escalation or authentication bypass
Zox News - Professional WordPress News & Magazine Theme is affected by privilege escalation or authentication bypass. Exploitation requires at least subscriber-level access. A successful request can grant permissions or access that the caller should not possess.
- Component
- Zox News - Professional WordPress News & Magazine Theme
- Affected
- See vendor advisory
- Safe version
- See mitigation notes
- Published
- Feb 11, 2025
- Weakness
- CWE-862 — Missing Authorization
This CVE was published Feb 11, 2025 and is one of 1 known issue for this plugin.
Update, patch or deactivate.
Update Zox News - Professional WordPress News & Magazine Theme to a release outside the affected range, or disable and remove it until a fixed version is available.
No confirmed safe version is listed. Consider a vendor-supported patch or temporarily restricting the affected functionality while you assess the risk.
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.
Technical description
The Zox News - Professional WordPress News & Magazine Theme plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to unauthorized data modification. This vulnerability can lead to privilege escalation and denial of service conditions due to missing capability checks on the backup_options() and reset_options() functions in all versions up to and including 3.17.0. This vulnerability allows authenticated attackers with Subscriber-level access and above to update and delete arbitrary option values on the WordPress site. Attackers can exploit this issue to update the default user role for registration to Administrator and enable user registration, thereby gaining administrative access to the vulnerable site. Additionally, they could delete critical options, causing errors that may disrupt the site's functionality and deny service to legitimate users.
CVE / CNA vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H