Description

The Soledad WordPress theme, used by more than 57,000 websites, contains a critical privilege escalation vulnerability identified as CVE-2025-64188, carrying a CVSS score of 9.8. This flaw allows any authenticated low-privilege user—such as a WordPress Subscriber to elevate their access to full administrative control. The vulnerability poses a significant risk because it enables attackers already inside the WordPress dashboard at a minimal permission level to overtake the entire site with minimal effort. The root cause of the vulnerability lies in the theme’s penci_update_option AJAX action handler, a function responsible for updating global WordPress configuration settings. Although this function performs a basic nonce verification to ensure the request originates from a valid WordPress session, it fails to check user capabilities. This omission means the handler does not validate whether the calling user has the appropriate permissions to modify sensitive settings. Since the nonce required to call this AJAX action is accessible to all logged-in users with /wp-admin/ access, even the lowest-privileged users can successfully exploit the flaw. Once triggered, the vulnerability allows an attacker to update critical WordPress options, including users_can_register and default_role. By enabling public registration and setting the default role to Administrator, the attacker can create a new account with full privileges, effectively granting themselves unrestricted control of the site. From this elevated position, they can upload backdoors, install malicious plugins, alter site content, manipulate SEO settings, or disable existing security mechanisms. All Soledad theme versions up to and including 8.6.9 are affected. The issue has been resolved in version 8.6.9.1, where proper capability checks were added to ensure only authorized users can execute the option-updating function. Site administrators are urged to upgrade immediately and audit existing user accounts for signs of suspicious privilege changes.