Live Exposure Defense: From CVE to Confirmed Exposure in 12 Hours – See more

Back
New CVE Detected

CVE-2026-56030 – Unauthenticated Privilege Escalation – Paytium WordPress Plugin <= 5.0.2

Be the first to know when new zero-days emerge:

Subscribe to Email Alerts
Subscribe to RSS Feed

Summary

CVE-2026-56030 is a critical unauthenticated privilege escalation vulnerability affecting the Paytium WordPress plugin (Mollie payment forms & donations) in all versions up to and including 5.0.2. With a CVSS v3.1 score of 9.8 (Critical), the flaw allows any unauthenticated remote attacker to assign themselves an elevated role on the target WordPress site, enabling full administrative takeover with no credentials required. A patched version (5.0.3) was released by the vendor on June 17, 2026.

Technical details

  • Root cause: Incorrect privilege assignment (CWE-266) via an unprotected hidden role parameter within the plugin. The parameter was not validated or access-controlled, allowing unauthenticated requests to specify an arbitrary elevated WordPress user role during processing.
  • Trigger conditions: No authentication or user interaction is required. An attacker sends a crafted HTTP request to the vulnerable endpoint, supplying a manipulated role value to obtain elevated privileges.
  • Attack vector: Network-accessible (AV:N); attack complexity is low (AC:L); no privileges (PR:N) or user interaction (UI:N) are required.
  • Impact: Successful exploitation grants the attacker an elevated or administrative WordPress role, leading to full compromise of the site’s confidentiality, integrity, and availability (C:H/I:H/A:H). This is equivalent in effect to a complete site takeover — an attacker with administrator-level access can install plugins, modify content, exfiltrate stored data (including payment configuration and customer records), and pivot further within the hosting environment.

Affected software

  • Paytium: Mollie payment forms & donations — all versions <= 5.0.2

Severity

  • CVSS v3.1 Base Score: 9.8 (Critical)
  • Vector string: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Mitigation and recommended actions

  • Immediate action: Update the Paytium plugin to version 5.0.3 or later. The vendor’s changelog for 5.0.3 explicitly notes: "FIX: Privilege Escalation via hidden role parameter vulnerability." The update is available directly from the WordPress Plugin Repository.
  • If immediate patching is not possible: Temporarily deactivate the Paytium plugin until the update can be applied, and restrict unauthenticated access to the WordPress admin interface and AJAX endpoints at the web server or WAF layer.

IONIX Status

The IONIX research team is tracking ongoing exploitation attempts and recommends immediate patching. Potentially affected assets are outlined in this post.

References

Are you exposed?

Get a free report of your organization’s exposure to this CVE and threat

  • Mapping of all Assets with this Technology
  • Identification of potentially exposed assets to this CVE
  • Confirmation of verified exploitable assets
Get Exposure Report

How IONIX’s External Exposure Management Platform Detects and Validates
Zero-Days to Shrink MTTR

1

Map your entire attack surface (continously)

IONIX uses multi-factor discovery methods, including DNS analysis, certificate mapping, metadata inspection, and more, to automatically map every internet-facing asset across your environment. This includes cloud instances, third-party platforms, shadow IT, and even forgotten infrastructure that traditional tools miss.

2

Monitor for new CVEs

Dozens of threat intel feeds using agentic technology are continuously analyzed to detect the appearance of proof-of-concept code, exploit kits, and indicators of active targeting. IONIX goes further by applying AI to proactively evaluate whether emerging vulnerabilities are likely to be exploited, even before PoCs go public.

3

Identify Potential External Exposures

Not all CVEs matter. IONIX filters vulnerabilities by asking attacker-centric questions: Can it be reached from the internet? Does it require authentication? Is it being exploited in the wild? This dramatically reduces noise and focuses teams on threats that can actually be weaponized.

4

Create Safe, Scalable Exploit Validations

IONIX transforms real-world PoCs into safe, non-intrusive test payloads that can be run in production environments without disruption. These simulations are precisely targeted to the systems that are vulnerable, ensuring rapid validation without unnecessary load.

5

Execute Exploit Validations

By combining context about software stack, versioning, exposure status, and reachability, IONIX ensures that only the right payloads are executed against the right assets, maximizing efficiency and minimizing risk.

6

Drive Fast and Actionable Remediation

Results are routed through integrations with ticketing, SOAR, and SIEM tools. Issues are written in plain language, bundled into remediation clusters, and prioritized based on asset criticality, exploitability, and blast radius. This shortens mean time to remediation (MTTR) and empowers teams to act with confidence.

Are you exposed?

Get a free report of your organization’s exposure to this CVE and threat

  • Mapping of all Assets with this Technology
  • Identification of potentially exposed assets to this CVE
  • Confirmation of verified exploitable assets
Get Exposure Report
Close

Subscribe to Threat Center RSS

Copy/paste the link below into your preferred RSS reader or follow these instructions to subscribe to Slack alerts.

Open RSS feedSlack setup instructions

Close

Get Real-Time CVE Alerts to Your Email

Be the first to know when new zero-days emerge