CVE-2026-120538
Easy Digital Downloads <= 3.7.2 - Unauthenticated Authentication Bypass to Administrator Account Takeover via Guest Checkout Email Binding at PayPal Capture
No exploitation reported by the sources we read.
- Published2026-11-03
- WeaknessCWE-287
Am I affected?
Debian, Ubuntu or Red Hat sometimes backport a fix without changing the upstream version number: such a version reads « to verify », never « affected ».With a domain, we read the version its public headers and pages expose. A distribution build can carry the fix under an older number.
Description
The Easy Digital Downloads plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to authentication bypass leading to administrator account takeover in all versions up to, and including, 3.7.2. During a PayPal guest checkout, the email address entered in the guest-checkout field is trusted as proof of identity: edd_get_purchase_form_user() binds the new guest order to an existing WordPress user purely on an email-address match, rewriting the order's user_id to that user's ID. The PayPal capture sink PurchaseUser::maybe_log_in_after_capture() then looked the user up by the order email (get_user_by( 'email', $order->email )) and, when $order->user_id equalled that user's ID (which the email-binding step guarantees), issued an authenticated session with wp_set_auth_cookie(). An unauthenticated attacker who starts a guest checkout using an administrator's email address (where that administrator has no existing EDD customer record) and completes the PayPal purchase flow therefore receives an authenticated session as that administrator — a full account takeover. The same sink is reachable through the standard PayPal checkout and the REST UnbrandedCard and Fastlane flows.
Timeline
dates in UTC- 2026-11-0304:43CVE publishedCNA
Observed activity
isMalicious corpus · updated 2026-11-03 03:37 UTCBlock these indicators
- Firewall list (EDL, text): https://api.ismalicious.com/edl/cve/CVE-2026-120538?format=txt
- CSV export: https://api.ismalicious.com/edl/cve/CVE-2026-120538?format=csv
- TAXII collection of exploited CVEs
- The EDL and CSV take an API key on the Pro plan.
Versions per branch
Products declared by the CNA
As Wordfence, the CNA that assigned this CVE, declared them in the CVE record; versions as written. NVD lists no product for this CVE yet: this is the only product data so far.
- smub Easy Digital Downloads – eCommerce Payments and Subscriptions made easyother versions: not affectedAffected
- ≤ 3.7.2no fix statedsemver
Source: the CNA record (CVE Program), © The MITRE Corporation,CVE Terms of UseCVE recordupdated 2026-11-03
Neither OSV.dev nor the vendor advisories we read list affected versions for CVE-2026-120538 yet.
Fix
No fix published by the sources we read yet. NVD record
Detection
- Nuclei template
- none so far ProjectDiscovery
- Exploit-DB
- no entry Exploit-DB
- Proof-of-concept repositories
- none listed PoC-in-GitHub
- Metasploit modules
- none listed Metasploit Framework
Sources
Technical details
- CVSS v3 Vector
- CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
- Published
- 2026-11-03
- Last Modified
- 2026-11-03
- NVD status
- Deferred
Frequently asked questions
What is CVE-2026-120538?
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