Privilege Escalation in WordPress Expire Users plugin
CVE-2026-4261 is a privilege escalation vulnerability in the Expire Users plugin for WordPress affecting all versions up to and including 1.2.2. The flaw is caused by insufficient authorization in the plugin's save_extra_user_profile_fields function, which allows a user to update the on_expire_default_to_role meta value. Because this role-related metadata can be modified by a low-privileged authenticated user, an attacker can abuse the plugin's expiration-role handling to assign a more privileged role. As described in the provided content, authenticated attackers with Subscriber-level access or higher can leverage this weakness to escalate their privileges to administrator.
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Impact, mitigation & remediation
What it means. What to do now. Patch path, mitigations, and the assume-compromise checklist.
Impact
What an attacker gets, and what they’ve been doing with it.
Mitigation
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Remediation
Patch, then assume compromise.
Exploits
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No public exploit code observed for this vulnerability.
Recent activity
10 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
The version that knows your environment.
Query your assets running an affected version, and investigate the blast radius.
Every observed campaign linking this CVE to a named adversary.
Malware families riding this exploit, with evidence and IOCs.
YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.
Cross-references every affected SKU, including bundled OEM variants.
Community discussion across Reddit, Mastodon, and other social sources.