CVE-2026-92978: User Registration & Membership cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability
medium 4.3 published 2026-10-17 · updated 2026-10-19
- Affected versions
- 5.2.8 and older
- Fixed in
- 5.3.0 *
- Latest version
- 5.3.1
- Severity
- Medium · CVSS 4.3
- Active installs
- 50,000+
- Type
- Cross-site request forgery (CSRF)
* The source does not name a fixed version; this is the first wordpress.org release after the last affected version.
What an attacker needs
- Access: None. No account or login is needed.
- Interaction: It also needs someone on the site (often an admin) to click a link, open a page or submit a form the attacker prepared.
CVSS vector (score by Wordfence): CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N
What to do now
- Update User Registration & Membership to 5.3.0 or newer (the latest is 5.3.1): Dashboard → Updates, or Plugins → “update now”.
- If you cannot update right away, deactivate it until you can.
- Turn on auto-updates for it: Plugins → “Enable auto-updates” on its row.
- Not sure which version you run? Check your version against every known User Registration & Membership issue.
With WP-CLI:
wp plugin get user-registration --field=version. - If you ran an affected version and something looks off (new admin users, spam pages, redirects), run the free scan below.
The advisory
The User Registration & Membership – Free & Paid Memberships, Subscriptions, Content Restriction, User Profile, Custom User Registration & Login Builder plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery in all versions up to, and including, 5.2.8 This is due to missing or incorrect nonce validation on the trigger_bulk_action function. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to force administrators to approve pending user registrations or deny arbitrary user accounts, locking targeted users out of the site via a forged request granted they can trick a site administrator into performing an action such as clicking on a link. An attacker can bypass the earlier nonce check in trigger_query_actions() by supplying an empty new_role parameter, which causes that handler to return early and cede control to the unprotected trigger_bulk_action() handler; the exit() call at the end of that handler additionally prevents WordPress core's own bulk-users nonce validation from executing.
References
- NVD CVE-2026-92978 nvd.nist.gov
- Wordfence advisory www.wordfence.com
- Code change (fix) plugins.trac.wordpress.org
- Plugin source plugins.trac.wordpress.org
Related
Ran an affected version? Check your site for signs of a hack
The free scan reads the public side of your site and looks for spam pages, hidden redirects, injected scripts and blacklist entries. No login, no install, about a minute.
Where this data comes from
- CVE record, score and references: NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD), checked 2026-11-04. This product uses data from the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD.
- Versions and install counts: wordpress.org/plugins/user-registration (Plugins API), fetched 2026-11-04.
- The summary, “what an attacker needs” and “what to do” sections are our plain-English reading of the record and the plugin's release history; the quoted description is the record's own text. Spot an error? Email Daniel.