The School Management System – SakolaWP plugin for WordPress suffers from a critical privilege escalation vulnerability identified as CVE-2024-12470, categorized under CWE-266 (Incorrect Privilege Assignment). This vulnerability exists in all versions up to and including 1.0.8. The root cause is the plugin’s registration function failing to properly restrict the user roles that can be assigned during registration. Specifically, unauthenticated attackers can exploit this flaw to register accounts with administrative privileges without any authentication or user interaction. The vulnerability has a CVSS v3.1 base score of 9.8, reflecting its critical severity. The attack vector is network-based (remote), with low attack complexity, no privileges required, and no user interaction needed. Successful exploitation compromises confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the affected WordPress site, granting attackers full administrative control. This could lead to unauthorized data access, modification, deletion, or complete site takeover. Although no patches have been released yet and no known exploits are reported in the wild, the vulnerability’s nature and severity make it a high priority for immediate mitigation. The plugin is primarily used in educational institutions managing school data, making the impact potentially severe in those environments.

The impact of CVE-2024-12470 is severe and wide-ranging. An attacker exploiting this vulnerability gains administrative privileges on the WordPress site running the SakolaWP plugin, enabling full control over the website and its data. This can lead to unauthorized disclosure of sensitive student and staff information, modification or deletion of critical data, defacement of the website, and the potential use of the compromised site as a launchpad for further attacks within the organization’s network. Educational institutions, which are the primary users of this plugin, may face significant operational disruption, reputational damage, and regulatory consequences due to data breaches. Additionally, since WordPress is widely used globally, any organization using this plugin is at risk. The vulnerability’s ease of exploitation and lack of required authentication increase the likelihood of rapid exploitation once public details become widely known.

1. Immediate mitigation involves disabling the user registration feature in WordPress or the SakolaWP plugin until a patch is available. 2. Restrict access to the registration endpoint using web application firewalls (WAFs) or IP whitelisting to prevent unauthorized registrations. 3. Monitor user accounts for any suspicious new administrative accounts and remove any unauthorized users promptly. 4. Implement strong logging and alerting to detect unusual registration activity. 5. Limit administrative privileges strictly to trusted users and enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all admin accounts to reduce the impact of potential compromise. 6. Regularly back up website data and configurations to enable recovery in case of compromise. 7. Stay informed about updates from the plugin vendor and apply patches immediately once released. 8. Consider alternative plugins with better security track records if immediate patching is not feasible.