CVE-2026-105971 in Car Dealer Dealership and Vehicle sales Plugin
Summary
by MITRE • 11/05/2026
The Car Dealer (Dealership) and Vehicle sales WordPress plugin through 4.73 does not restrict its unauthenticated single-listing AJAX action to published content, allowing an unauthenticated attacker to read the title, content and metadata of any private, draft, pending, future or trashed post by supplying its numeric id.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 11/05/2026
The vulnerability identified in The Car Dealer WordPress plugin versions up to 4.73 represents a critical failure in access control mechanisms within the application's AJAX handling logic. This flaw specifically affects the unauthenticated single-listing AJAX action, which is designed to retrieve details for individual vehicle listings displayed on public-facing pages. In a secure implementation of such functionality, the server-side script must verify that the requested resource exists and is publicly accessible before returning any data. However, in this instance, the plugin fails to enforce these restrictions, allowing an attacker who does not possess valid authentication credentials to interact directly with the underlying database queries via crafted HTTP requests.
The technical root cause of this vulnerability lies in the insufficient validation of post status during the AJAX request processing phase. When a user submits a numeric identifier for a vehicle listing, the backend script retrieves the corresponding record from the WordPress database without checking whether that record is marked as published, private, draft, pending, future-dated, or trashed. By exploiting this lack of filtering, an unauthenticated attacker can iterate through sequential integer IDs to enumerate and extract sensitive information associated with any post in the system. This behavior effectively bypasses the standard role-based access controls enforced by WordPress for non-public content types, turning a public-facing feature into a vector for unauthorized data disclosure.
The operational impact of this vulnerability is significant, particularly regarding privacy compliance and intellectual property protection. Attackers can harvest titles, full content descriptions, and associated metadata from private listings that were intended to be visible only to specific users or administrators. This includes draft vehicles not yet ready for public sale, pending approvals requiring internal review, and trashed items that should have been logically removed from active views. The exposure of such data can lead to competitive intelligence theft, where rivals gain insight into inventory strategies, pricing models, and upcoming releases before they are officially announced. Furthermore, the leakage of metadata may expose additional sensitive details embedded in post content or custom fields, potentially compromising user privacy if personal contact information was inadvertently included in draft listings during testing phases.
From a classification perspective, this vulnerability aligns with CWE-200: Information Exposure and CWE-862: Missing Authorization, as the application fails to enforce proper access controls on sensitive resources. In terms of attack patterns, it corresponds to MITRE ATT&CK technique T1530: Data from Cloud Storage Objects or more broadly data exfiltration through API endpoints where input validation is insufficient. The exploitation requires no prior authentication and can be automated using simple scripting tools that send HTTP POST requests with varying ID parameters to the specific AJAX endpoint, making it a high-risk issue for any deployment of this plugin in production environments.
To mitigate this vulnerability, immediate action must be taken by updating The Car Dealer WordPress plugin to version 4.73 or later where these access control checks have been implemented. For organizations unable to update immediately due to compatibility constraints with other plugins or custom code modifications, a temporary workaround involves restricting direct access to the specific AJAX endpoint via web server configuration rules if possible, although this is less reliable than patching the application logic itself. Developers should also review any custom integrations that rely on similar unauthenticated data retrieval patterns and ensure they implement strict post status verification before returning content. Regular security audits focusing on input validation and authorization checks in all public-facing API endpoints are essential to prevent similar exposures in WordPress ecosystems where AJAX functionality is heavily utilized for dynamic content loading.