Consulting — Business, Finance WordPress Theme <= 6.7.16 - Authenticated (Subscriber+) Privilege Escalation via AJAX

Overview

Advisory ID

CVE-2026-14805

Product

Consulting - Business, Finance WordPress Theme consulting

Affected

≤6.7.16

Fixed in

6.7.17

Weakness

CWE-269 Privilege Escalation

Required access

Unknown

Published

Sep 14, 2026 · updated Nov 13, 2026

Credit

lhking

Source

Wordfence Intelligence

The Consulting theme for WordPress is vulnerable to Privilege Escalation in versions up to, and including, 6.7.16. This is due to a combination of two flaws: (1) the masterstudy_ms_stm_set_discard_transient AJAX endpoint in admin/admin-notices/classes/STMHandler.php accepts an arbitrary transient key without capability checks or nonce validation, and (2) the developer access login mechanism in admin/classes/stm-theme-support.php authenticates users based on a transient value without proper cryptographic validation when in legacy string mode. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with subscriber-level access and above, to set the stm_developer_access_token transient to a known value (1), then authenticate as any existing user including administrators by visiting a specially crafted URL, thereby achieving full privilege escalation to administrator.

Not sure which version you run? Run a passive check — it reads public files only.

Remediation & mitigations

1. Update to version 6.7.17, or a newer patched version
2. Rotate administrator passwords and application secrets if the site ran a vulnerable version while publicly reachable.