CVE-2026-14805 — Consulting - Business, Finance WordPress Theme <= 6.7.16 - Authenticated (Subscriber+) Privilege Escalation via AJAX

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.

Published Sep 15, 2026Updated Sep 17, 2026Sources: cvelistV5, Wordfence

Triage

Is it exploited, how likely is exploitation, what does it touch, and how severe do the scoring sources call it.

Exploitation

Unreported

no source claims exploitation

EPSS

chance of exploitation in 30 days

Affects

stylemixthemes

consulting_business_finance_wordpress_theme

CVSS base

8.8

HIGH

CISA SSVC assessment

Three decision points CISA publishes for the CVEs it assesses · SSVC 2.0.3. A stakeholder decision, not a severity score.

CISA

Exploitation

None

none · proof-of-concept · active

Automatable

can an attacker script all four kill-chain steps

Technical impact

Total

partial · total control of the vulnerable component

Affected scope

The catalog records vendors and products as separate lists, not pairs, so which product belongs to which vendor is not something this page can say.

Vendors (1)

stylemixthemes

Products (1)

consulting business finance wordpress theme

Every base score collected

Sources score independently and disagree; each row says who scored it and under which version.

Score	Version	Severity	Expl.	Impact	Source
8.8	CVSS 3.1	HIGH	—	—	cvelistV5

Weakness & attack patterns

CWE-269

Attack patterns reported against this CVE. The ATT&CK techniques below are inferred from its weakness class.

T1548Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism

Detection

Read off the CVSS vector and the weakness class. Starting points, not rules we have tested.

Search application, proxy, and WAF logs for requests touching /admin-notices/classes/STMHandler.php, /classes/stm-theme-support.php.

References

2 on the record

Elsewhere on this site

stylemixthemesevery CVE for this vendor
CWE-269other pages naming this weakness

Not in any source we poll

Listed rather than left blank: an empty field and an unmeasured one look identical on screen, and only one is a reason to look elsewhere.

No confirmed IOCs, IP addresses, domains, file hashes, or malware artifacts supplied.
No organization-specific asset inventory, compensating-control status, or patch deployment evidence supplied.
No exploit packet captures, log samples, or incident case IDs supplied.