05/11/2025
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100,000 WordPress Sites Affected by Privilege Escalation Vulnerability in AI Engine WordPress Plugin
https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2025/11/100000-wordpress-sites-affected-by-privilege-escalation-vulnerability-in-ai-engine-wordpress-plugin/
On October 4th, 2025, we received a submission for a Sensitive Information Exposure vulnerability in AI Engine, a WordPress plugin with more than 100,000 active installations.
This vulnerability can be exploited by unauthenticated attackers to extract the bearer token and then get full access to the MCP and execute various commands like ‘wp_update_user’, allowing them to escalate their privileges to administrators by updating their user role.
Please note that this vulnerability only critically affects users who have enabled the ‘No-Auth URL’ in the MCP settings, which is disabled by default.
Props to Emiliano Versini who discovered and responsibly reported this vulnerability through the Wordfence Bug Bounty Program. This vulnerability was disclosed to our program just one day after it was introduced.
This researcher earned a bounty of $2,145.00 for this discovery. Our mission is to secure WordPress through defense in depth, which is why we are investing in quality vulnerability research and collaborating with researchers of this caliber through our Bug Bounty Program.
We are committed to making the WordPress ecosystem more secure through the detection and prevention of vulnerabilities, which is a critical element to our multi-layered approach to security.
Wordfence Premium, Wordfence Care, and Wordfence Response users received a firewall rule to protect against any exploits targeting this vulnerability on October 15, 2025. Sites using the free version of Wordfence will receive the same protection 30 days later on November 14, 2025.
We provided full disclosure details to Jordy Meow instantly through our Wordfence Vulnerability Management Portal on October 14, 2025. The developer released the patch on October 19, 2025. We would like to commend Jordy Meow for their prompt response and timely patch.
We would like to draw attention to the fact that for those who have enabled this setting, the bearer token may have been exposed on their websites. This means that the only secure solution is to rotate the token, so we recommend performing this action immediately.
We urge users to update their sites with the latest patched version of AI Engine, version 3.1.4 at the time of this publication, and change the token in the settings page, as soon as possible.
