CVE-2025-14371: Missing Auth — MEDIUM

CISO Take

A missing authorization check in the WordPress AI Autotagger plugin (OpenAI integration) lets any authenticated Contributor silently manipulate tags and categories across all site posts—including posts they don't own. Patch to 3.41.1+ immediately. The OpenAI API component itself is not exploited; risk is content integrity, not model compromise or data breach.

What is the risk?

Low-medium practical risk. Exploitation requires a valid Contributor-level account, so unauthenticated external attackers are unexposed. Attack complexity is trivial—no AI or ML knowledge required, just awareness of the vulnerable AJAX endpoint. Impact is confined to taxonomy manipulation rather than data exfiltration or code execution. Sites with open contributor registration, shared editorial accounts, or downstream AI pipelines ingesting CMS metadata face elevated exposure. Not in CISA KEV; no EPSS data available.

How severe is it?

CVSS 3.1

4.3 / 10

EPSS

0.2%

chance of exploitation in 30 days

Higher than 9% of all CVEs

Source: EPSS v3 — FIRST.org

Exploitation Status

Exploit Available

Exploitation: MEDIUM

Sophistication

Trivial

Exploitation Confidence

medium

○ Public PoC indexed (trickest/cve)

Composite signal derived from CISA KEV, VulnCheck KEV, CISA SSVC, EPSS, Metasploit, Exploit-DB, trickest/cve, Nuclei templates, and inthewild.io exploitation reports.

What is the attack surface?

AV Network

AC Low

PR Low

UI None

S Unchanged

C None

I Low

A None

What should I do?

5 steps

Patch immediately: upgrade the Tag, Category, and Taxonomy Manager plugin to 3.41.1 or later.
If patching is delayed, audit Contributor role assignments and revoke unnecessary accounts.
Enable WordPress activity logging (e.g., WP Activity Log) and alert on bulk taxonomy changes outside normal editorial hours.
Audit downstream AI pipelines that ingest WordPress taxonomy metadata—validate data integrity and re-index if manipulation is suspected.
Enforce least-privilege by restricting Contributor access to AI taxonomy features via a role-management plugin until the patch is applied.

What does CISA's SSVC say?

Decision Track

Exploitation none

Automatable No

Technical Impact partial

Source: CISA Vulnrichment (SSVC v2.0). Decision based on the CISA Coordinator decision tree.

How is it classified?

Auth Bypass Plugin API AML.T0012 - Valid Accounts AML.T0047 - AI-Enabled Product or Service AML.T0049 - Exploit Public-Facing Application AML.T0099 - AI Agent Tool Data Poisoning

Which compliance frameworks are affected?

This CVE is relevant to:

EU AI Act

Art. 15 - Accuracy, robustness and cybersecurity Art. 9 - Risk Management System

ISO 42001

A.6.2 - AI System Roles and Responsibilities

NIST AI RMF

GOVERN 6.1 - Policies and procedures for defining and differentiating roles in human-AI configurations

OWASP LLM Top 10

LLM07 - Insecure Plugin Design LLM07:2023 - Insecure Plugin Design

Frequently Asked Questions

What is CVE-2025-14371?

A missing authorization check in the WordPress AI Autotagger plugin (OpenAI integration) lets any authenticated Contributor silently manipulate tags and categories across all site posts—including posts they don't own. Patch to 3.41.1+ immediately. The OpenAI API component itself is not exploited; risk is content integrity, not model compromise or data breach.

Is CVE-2025-14371 actively exploited?

Proof-of-concept exploit code is publicly available for CVE-2025-14371, increasing the risk of exploitation.

How to fix CVE-2025-14371?

1. Patch immediately: upgrade the Tag, Category, and Taxonomy Manager plugin to 3.41.1 or later. 2. If patching is delayed, audit Contributor role assignments and revoke unnecessary accounts. 3. Enable WordPress activity logging (e.g., WP Activity Log) and alert on bulk taxonomy changes outside normal editorial hours. 4. Audit downstream AI pipelines that ingest WordPress taxonomy metadata—validate data integrity and re-index if manipulation is suspected. 5. Enforce least-privilege by restricting Contributor access to AI taxonomy features via a role-management plugin until the patch is applied.

What systems are affected by CVE-2025-14371?

This vulnerability affects the following AI/ML architecture patterns: LLM-integrated CMS plugins, AI content classification pipelines, RAG pipelines ingesting CMS taxonomy metadata, AI-powered content recommendation systems, Semantic search indexes fed by WordPress content.

What is the CVSS score for CVE-2025-14371?

CVE-2025-14371 has a CVSS v3.1 base score of 4.3 (MEDIUM). The EPSS exploitation probability is 0.19%.

What is the AI security impact?

Affected AI Architectures

LLM-integrated CMS pluginsAI content classification pipelinesRAG pipelines ingesting CMS taxonomy metadataAI-powered content recommendation systemsSemantic search indexes fed by WordPress content

MITRE ATLAS Techniques

AML.T0012 Valid Accounts

AML.T0047 AI-Enabled Product or Service

AML.T0049 Exploit Public-Facing Application

AML.T0099 AI Agent Tool Data Poisoning

Compliance Controls Affected

EU AI Act: Art. 15, Art. 9

ISO 42001: A.6.2

NIST AI RMF: GOVERN 6.1

OWASP LLM Top 10: LLM07, LLM07:2023

What are the technical details?

Original Advisory

The Tag, Category, and Taxonomy Manager – AI Autotagger with OpenAI plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to unauthorized modification of data due to a missing capability check on the taxopress_ai_add_post_term function in all versions up to, and including, 3.41.0. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Contributor-level access and above, to add or remove taxonomy terms (tags, categories) on any post, including ones they do not own.

Exploitation Scenario

An attacker registers or compromises a Contributor account on a target WordPress site running the vulnerable plugin. With no AI expertise required, they craft a direct POST to the taxopress_ai_add_post_term AJAX endpoint, targeting arbitrary post IDs to inject misleading tags or strip accurate categories from high-traffic or compliance-sensitive content. If the site uses a RAG pipeline that ingests WordPress taxonomy for content retrieval or classification, the attacker's poisoned taxonomy silently degrades retrieval relevance over weeks—going undetected until a content audit or user complaint surfaces the manipulation. The attack leaves no obvious footprint in standard WordPress logs unless activity monitoring is enabled.

Weaknesses (CWE)

CWE-862 Missing Authorization Primary

CWE-862 — Missing Authorization: The product does not perform an authorization check when an actor attempts to access a resource or perform an action.

[Architecture and Design] Divide the product into anonymous, normal, privileged, and administrative areas. Reduce the attack surface by carefully mapping roles with data and functionality. Use role-based access control (RBAC) [REF-229] to enforce the roles at the appropriate boundaries. Note that this approach may not protect against horizontal authorization, i.e., it will not protect a user from attacking others with the same role.
[Architecture and Design] Ensure that access control checks are performed related to the business logic. These checks may be different than the access control checks that are applied to more generic resources such as files, connections, processes, memory, and database records. For example, a database may restrict access for medical records to a specific database user, but each record might only be intended to be accessible to the patient and the patient's doctor [REF-7].

Source: MITRE CWE corpus.