CVE-2024-13643 Zox News <= 3.17.0 - Missing Authorization to Authenticated (Subscriber+) Arbitrary Options Modification

What is CVE-2024-13643?

CVE-2024-13643 is a high-severity missing authorization vulnerability in MVPThemes Zox News - Professional WordPress News & Magazine Theme, published on 11 Feb 2025. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

The Zox News - Professional WordPress News & Magazine Theme plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to unauthorized data modification. This vulnerability can lead to privilege escalation and denial of service conditions due to missing capability checks on the backup_options() and reset_options() functions in all versions up to and including 3.17.0. This vulnerability allows authenticated attackers with Subscriber-level access and above to update and delete arbitrary option values on the WordPress site. Attackers can exploit this issue to update the default user role for registration to Administrator and enable user registration, thereby gaining administrative access to the vulnerable site. Additionally, they could delete critical options, causing errors that may disrupt the site's functionality and deny service to legitimate users.

Weakness: CWE-862

Which versions are affected by CVE-2024-13643?

How do I fix CVE-2024-13643?

No fix has been published for CVE-2024-13643 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.

Upgrade, and check permissions on every request on the server, not only in the interface. More about Missing authorization.

Is CVE-2024-13643 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2024-13643 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as GHSA-3h9j-fvqm-h724.