A high-severity security vulnerability has been identified in the WordPress plugin “Modular DS (Modular Connector),” and numerous security reports suggest that this vulnerability is being exploited in real-world attacks. The vulnerability is identified as CVE-2026-23550 and has received a rating of 10 out of 10, as it allows unauthenticated remote admin privileges .
This means that its exploitation could allow attackers to take control of administrator accounts and perform further malicious activities, and recommends urgent updates and security checks for potential breaches.
Modular DS is a connector-like plugin that remotely manages multiple WordPress sites. While it offers the benefit of increased operational efficiency, the risk of significant damage is high, as the entire site could be compromised if an attacker were to take control of its management functions . Specifically, WordPress administrator privileges can be used to modify users, plugins, themes, settings, and, in some cases, even files. Therefore, the theft of these privileges could lead to complete control of the site.
The crux of this vulnerability is that the routing structure of the API path exposed by the plugin and the way it handles authentication can effectively defeat the authentication barrier. According to the report, the plugin was designed to protect certain paths from the authentication middleware, but if a mode classified as “direct request” was enabled and a request with certain parameters was sent, a problem arose that allowed the protected path to be accessed without going through the normal authentication process.
In other words, there was no “cryptographic proof” to verify that the request actually came from a trusted internal system , and if the site was already connected to an external management system and a token existed, the attacker was more likely to bypass the authentication process.
This vulnerability affects versions 2.5.1 and earlier, and a fix was released in version 2.5.2. They also emphasize that updating alone is not enough; a thorough security check for potential compromises is essential. If an attacker has already gained administrative privileges, it’s difficult to rule out the possibility of causing further damage by modifying plugins and themes or installing malicious files.
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