Vulnerability in Consulting — CVE-2026-14805

What to do now

Update Consulting to 6.7.17 or later.

Affected versions

• Everything up to and including 6.7.16

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.

This description is reproduced verbatim from the public vulnerability record.

• https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/bc8dffc2-ae5b-4482-9eba-adc439a52c26?source=api-prod

Part of this record comes from Wordfence Intelligence. Original: https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/bc8dffc2-ae5b-4482-9eba-adc439a52c26
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