CVE-2025-14371 — MEDIUM (CVSS 4.3) AI Security Vulnerability

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.

Risk Assessment

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.

Severity & Risk

CVSS 3.1

4.3 / 10

EPSS

0.0%

chance of exploitation in 30 days

Higher than 14% 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, CISA SSVC, EPSS, trickest/cve, and Nuclei templates.

Attack Surface

AV Network

AC Low

PR Low

UI None

S Unchanged

C None

I Low

A None

Recommended Action

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.

CISA SSVC Assessment

Decision Track

Exploitation none

Automatable No

Technical Impact partial

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

Classification

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

Compliance Impact

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 0.04%.

Technical Details

NVD Description

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.