# Essential Real Estate <= 5.3.4 - Authenticated (Subscriber+) Payment Bypass via Free Package Activation

- **ID:** WPSEC-2026-2166
- **Plugin:** Essential Real Estate (`essential-real-estate`), https://wordpress.org/plugins/essential-real-estate/
- **Affected versions:** all versions before 5.3.5
- **Fixed in:** 5.3.5 (Update to 5.3.5 or later.)
- **Severity:** Medium 4.3 (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N)
- **Weakness:** CWE-840
- **Usage among sites WPSec scans:** plugin Low, affected versions Low (as of 2026-10-31)
- **Attack surface analysis:** https://attacksurface.wpsec.com/plugin/essential-real-estate
- **Fix released:** 2026-10-30
- **Published:** 2026-10-31
- **URL:** https://wpsec.com/vuln/WPSEC-2026-2166/

## Description

The Essential Real Estate plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to payment bypass via the ere_free_package_ajax AJAX action in all versions up to, and including, 5.3.4, due to the function not checking that the user-supplied 'package_id' refers to a published free package, or that the user has not already used their free package. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Subscriber-level access and above, to activate paid listing packages without paying, and to reuse the free package as many times as they like.

## References

- https://wpsec.com/vuln/WPSEC-2026-2166/
- https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/essential-real-estate/tags/5.3.5/
- https://wordpress.org/plugins/essential-real-estate/

Source: WPSec, https://wpsec.com/vuln/WPSEC-2026-2166/

License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Free to use, share and adapt, also commercially, if you credit WPSec and link to this advisory.