#privilege-escalation

#privilege-escalation

A critical security flaw impacting a WordPress plugin known as King Addons for Elementor has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, CVE-2025-8489 (CVSS score: 9.8), is a case of privilege escalation that allows unauthenticated attackers to grant themselves administrative privileges by simply specifying the administrator user role during registration. It affects versions from 24.12.92 through 51.1.14. It was patched by the maintainers in version 51.1.35 released on September 25, 2025. Security researcher Peter Thaleikis has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. The plugin has over 10,000 active installs.

Microsoft on Tuesday released patches for 63 new security vulnerabilities identified in its software, including one that has come under active exploitation in the wild. Of the 63 flaws, four are rated Critical and 59 are rated Important in severity. Twenty-nine of these vulnerabilities are related to privilege escalation, followed by 16 remote code execution, 11 information disclosure, three denial-of-service (DoS), two security feature bypass, and two spoofing bugs.

Both CVE-2025-6204 and CVE-2025-6205 affect DELMIA Apriso versions from Release 2020 through Release 2025. They were addressed by Dassault Systèmes in early August. According to details shared by ProjectDiscovery researchers Rahul Maini, Harsh Jaiswal, and Parth Malhotra last month, the two security flaws can be fashioned together into an exploit chain to create accounts with elevated privileges and then drop executable files into a web-served directory, resulting in a full application compromise.

A data breach affecting over six million people has resulted in a £14 million fine for professional services firm Capita following an investigation by the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). The fine is split between Capita Plc and Capita Pension Solutions, which have been billed £8 million and £6 million respectively for the March 2023 attack. According to the ICO, the UK's data protection authority, Capita failed in three areas: preventing privilege escalation and unauthorized lateral movement, responding appropriately to security alerts, and penetration and risk assessment.

A critical token validation failure in Microsoft Entra ID (previously Azure Active Directory) could have allowed attackers to impersonate any user, including Global Administrators, across any tenant. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-55241, has been assigned the maximum CVSS score of 10.0. It has been described by Microsoft as a privilege escalation flaw in Azure Entra. There is no indication that the issue was exploited in the wild. It has been addressed by the Windows maker as of July 17, 2025, requiring no customer action.

Artificial intelligence has notorious problems with accuracy - so maybe it's not surprising that using it as a coding assistant creates more security problems, too. As a security firm called Apiiro found in new research, developers who used AI produce ten times more security problems than their counterparts who don't use the technology. Looking at code from thousands of developers and tens of thousand repositories, Apiiro found that AI-assisted devs were indeed producing three or four times more code - and as the firm's product manager Itay Nussbaum suggested, that breakneck pace seems to be causing the security gaps.

CVE-2025-53786 is an elevation of privilege bug that Outsider Security's Dirk-jan Mollema reported to Microsoft. It exists because of the way hybrid Exchange deployments, which connect on-premises Exchange servers to Exchange Online, use a shared identity to authenticate users between the two environments.

CVE-2025-32462 has received a lower CVSS score due to the conditions that are needed. Namely, successful execution would require someone to make a misconfiguration and deploy a Sudoers file with an incorrect host for this vulnerability to work.