CVE-2025-11835

Paid Membership Subscriptions – Effortless Memberships, Recurring Payments & Content Restriction <= 2.16.4 - Missing Authorization to Unauthenticated Arbitrary Member Subscription Auto Renewal

2025-11-04 14:36
Rafshanzani Suhada

Strategic Overview

Status
Patched in 2.16.5
Affected Plugin
Paid Membership Subscriptions – Effortless Memberships, Recurring Payments & Content Restriction
Affected Version
<= 2.16.4
CVSS
5.3Medium
Weakness type
CWE-862 · Missing Authorization
CVE
CVE-2025-11835
View all Paid Membership Subscriptions – Effortless Memberships, Recurring Payments & Content Restriction vulnerabilities

At a glance

CVE-2025-11835 is a medium-severity Missing Authorization vulnerability in the Paid Membership Subscriptions WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 2.16.4. It carries a CVSS score of 5.3 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity). Exploitation requires no authentication. The issue is fixed in version 2.16.5; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed November 2025, reported by Rafshanzani Suhada.

Vulnerability Overview

The Paid Membership Subscriptions – Effortless Memberships, Recurring Payments & Content Restriction plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to unauthorized modification of data due to a missing capability and validation check on the PMS_AJAX_Checkout_Handler::process_payment() function in all versions up to, and including, 2.16.4. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to trigger stored auto-renew charges for arbitrary members.

Technical Analysis

The vector marks this flaw as remotely reachable over the network, with low attack complexity — no special timing or configuration is needed, and no privileges on the target site, and no interaction from a victim user.

CWE-862: Missing Authorization

Paid Membership Subscriptions <= 2.16.4 carries this weakness at process_payment(), and reaching it takes no account at all. A missing authorization check means a function is reachable by anyone who can reach the endpoint, because the code never asks whether the caller is allowed to perform the action.

Any user who can reach the endpoint gets to run an action reserved for higher-privileged roles, from reading protected data to changing settings or content. For Paid Membership Subscriptions the fix is 2.16.5: builds <= 2.16.4 are affected, anything from 2.16.5 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 2.16.5, or a newer patched version

How does WordSec protect against this?

This one needs no account at all, which puts it outside what login hardening can reach; WordSec's login security narrows the account-level paths around it, and the firewall is what inspects the request itself. None of that substitutes for the fix: Paid Membership Subscriptions 2.16.5 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

  • Login Security
  • Alerts

External References

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-11835https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/eb1948bd-c5b4-4fbe-9aa6-19f24325e6bbhttps://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-11835

Related records

Vulnerability data © Defiant, Inc., provided under the Wordfence Intelligence T&C