Detections
Analytics
CVE-2025-5953
high
Description
The WP Human Resource Management plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Privilege Escalation due to missing authorization in the ajax_insert_employee() and update_empoyee() functions in versions 2.0.0 through 2.2.17. The AJAX handler reads the client-supplied $_POST['role'] and, after basic cleaning via hrm_clean(), passes it directly to wp_insert_user() and later to $user->set_role() without verifying that the current user is allowed to assign that role. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Employee-level access and above, to elevate their privileges to administrator.
References
https://wordpress.org/plugins/hrm/#developers
https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/hrm/tags/2.2.17/class/employee.php#L89
https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/hrm/tags/2.2.17/class/employee.php#L591
https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/hrm/tags/2.2.17/class/employee.php#L543