# Simple Membership <= 4.8.7 - Unauthenticated Sensitive Information Exposure via Protected Post Comments

- **ID:** WPSEC-2026-2865
- **Plugin:** Simple Membership (`simple-membership`), https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-membership/
- **Affected versions:** all versions before 4.8.8
- **Fixed in:** 4.8.8 (Update to 4.8.8 or later.)
- **Severity:** Medium 5.3 (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N)
- **Weakness:** CWE-200
- **Usage among sites WPSec scans:** plugin Medium, affected versions Medium (as of 2026-11-12)
- **Attack surface analysis:** https://attacksurface.wpsec.com/plugin/simple-membership
- **Fix released:** 2026-11-10
- **Published:** 2026-11-12
- **URL:** https://wpsec.com/vuln/WPSEC-2026-2865/

## Description

The Simple Membership plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Sensitive Information Exposure via the comment protection feature in all versions up to, and including, 4.8.7, due to the comment_text filter checking access only against the global $comment variable. Renderers that do not set that variable, such as the Comment Content block of block themes (for example, Twenty Twenty-Five) and the REST API comments endpoint, therefore skip the check. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to read comments on posts and pages restricted to members.

## References

- https://wpsec.com/vuln/WPSEC-2026-2865/
- https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/simple-membership/tags/4.8.8/
- https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-membership/

Source: WPSec, https://wpsec.com/vuln/WPSEC-2026-2865/

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.