Security Resilience

CVE-2024-12171

Access Control in Elula Wsdesk ≤ 3.2.7

Published
01 February 2025
Modified
24 February 2025
Patch / advisory
CVSS Score v3.1 8.8
Click a component to see what it means
Raw vectorCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
EPSS Score 0.0050 42th percentile
Risk Priority 64 floored blend · peak EPSS

CVSS and EPSS are reproduced from their sources (NVD, FIRST EPSS). Risk Priority is our own derived reading, not an NVD score.

Summary

CVE-2024-12171 is a high-severity Missing Authorization (CWE-862) vulnerability in Elula Wsdesk. Its CVSS base score is 8.8 (High).

Operationally, ranked at the 42th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

The strongest mitigations our analysis identified map to AC-24 (Access Control Decisions) and AC-25 (Reference Monitor) — see the control section below for these in your framework.

Deeper analysis AI-assisted summary

Synthesised by an AI model from the NVD description and linked references — a reading aid, not an authoritative source.

CVE-2024-12171 is a privilege escalation vulnerability in the ELEX WordPress HelpDesk & Customer Ticketing System plugin for WordPress, stemming from a missing capability check on the 'eh_crm_agent_add_user' AJAX action. It affects all versions up to and including 3.2.6. The issue is classified under CWE-862 (Missing Authorization) with a CVSS v3.1 base score of 8.8 (AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H), indicating high severity due to its potential for significant confidentiality, integrity, and availability impacts.

Authenticated attackers with Subscriber-level access or higher can exploit this vulnerability remotely over the network with low complexity and no user interaction required. By sending a crafted AJAX request to the 'eh_crm_agent_add_user' action, they can create new administrative user accounts, effectively granting themselves or others full administrative privileges on the targeted WordPress site.

Wordfence published threat intelligence on the vulnerability, and remediation is available via patches in the WordPress plugin trac repository, including changesets such as 3227859 in class-crm-ajax-functions-one.php and related updates around changeset 3213791. Security practitioners should update to a version beyond 3.2.6 and review existing low-privilege accounts for signs of abuse.

OWASP Top 10 for Web (2025)

EU & UK References

Vulnerability Data

The ELEX WordPress HelpDesk & Customer Ticketing System plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to privilege escalation due to a missing capability check on the 'eh_crm_agent_add_user' AJAX action in all versions up to, and including, 3.2.6. This makes it possible for…

more

authenticated attackers, with Subscriber-level access and above, to create new administrative user accounts.

CWE(s)

Related Threats

CVEs Like This One

CVE-2023-5426Shared CWE-862
CVE-2024-3312Shared CWE-862
CVE-2023-4645Shared CWE-862
CVE-2024-23944Shared CWE-862
CVE-2024-11583Shared CWE-862
CVE-2025-23862Shared CWE-862
CVE-2025-23763Shared CWE-862
CVE-2023-34063Shared CWE-862
CVE-2023-3204Shared CWE-862
CVE-2025-30990Shared CWE-862

Affected Assets

elula
wsdesk
≤ 3.2.7

Mitigating Controls

Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5) AI

AC-3 directly requires enforcement of authorization decisions on every access request, structurally eliminating missing authorization checks.

AC-24 mandates that access control decisions are applied to each request, preventing bypass of authorization logic.

AC-25 requires a tamperproof, always-invoked reference monitor that ensures authorization checks cannot be omitted.

AC-6 reduces the set of actions reachable without proper authorization, limiting blast radius of missing checks.

Mitigating Controls (ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Annex A) AI

Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→ISO cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.

blocks

Requiring formal authorization of every access request before rights are granted ensures that checks for required permissions are performed, preventing missing authorization checks from being introduced.

blocks

A.5.18's provisioning, review, revocation and activation steps (incl. owner approval, SoD, timely removal on role/termination change) directly stop exploitation of missing authorization checks by ensuring no actor receives or retains rights to resources they should not access; the bounded remainder is that it cannot stop missing-authorization defects inside the enforcement mechanism itself once rights have been granted (e.g. flawed code that ignores the rights table).

finds

By requiring competent outsiders to verify that every function enforces the need-to-know principle, the control lowers the likelihood that missing authorization checks persist undetected.

blocks

A.5.8 integrates risk assessment, requirements elicitation and governance into the project lifecycle so that authorization needs can be identified and specified; it does not itself perform or enforce authorization checks, so the missing-authorization weakness can still be present and exploitable.

blocks

Security checkpoints and explicit authorization requirements in the design phase ensure that every sensitive function is paired with an access-control check, reducing missing-authorization defects.

blocks

A.8.27 mandates security-by-design principles (least privilege, default deny, security architecture integration, zero-trust never-trust/always-verify, dynamic access control) plus design reviews that directly specify and enforce authorization checks before access; this stops most missing-authorization cases from being exploitable, with a bounded remainder in non-architectural or legacy components where the principles were documented but not fully applied.

Hardening callouts derived

DISA STIG baselines are authored against specific weaknesses. Where this CVE cites a broad weakness class, the mapping is not asserted at that abstraction (owner ruling, 2026-09-25: grade only at Base and below), so no rule is shown here rather than a rule shown against the wrong grain.

  • No fine-grained STIG row for CWE-862, a class-level weakness, and none of its children carries one either.

References