CVE-2025-48267: Exploiting Path Traversal Vulnerability in ThimPress WP Pipes

Overview

This blog post delves into the CVE-2025-48267 vulnerability, a Path Traversal vulnerability found in ThimPress WP Pipes, a WordPress plugin. This vulnerability affects all ThimPress WP Pipes versions up to and including 1.4.2. It is a significant issue as it provides potential attackers with a mechanism to compromise systems or leak data, which could have devastating consequences for any business, including reputation damage, financial loss, and potential legal implications.

Vulnerability Summary

CVE ID: CVE-2025-48267
Severity: High (CVSS: 8.6)
Attack Vector: Network
Privileges Required: None
User Interaction: None
Impact: System Compromise and Data Leakage

Affected Products

Product | Affected Versions

ThimPress WP Pipes | up to and including 1.4.2

How the Exploit Works

The Path Traversal vulnerability in ThimPress WP Pipes allows an attacker to access sensitive data by manipulating file and directory paths. By injecting malicious input into the file path parameters used by the plugin, an attacker can traverse outside of the intended directory and gain access to restricted directories or files. This vulnerability can be exploited remotely and does not require any form of authentication or user interaction.

Conceptual Example Code

Here’s an example of how this vulnerability might be exploited using a HTTP request:

GET /wp-content/plugins/wp-pipes/pipes-api.php?task=../../../../../../../etc/passwd HTTP/1.1
Host: target.example.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.198 Safari/537.36
Accept: */*
Referer: http://target.example.com/
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9
Connection: close

In the above example, the attacker is attempting to retrieve the contents of the “/etc/passwd” file, which is a common target for such attacks as it can contain sensitive user information.

Mitigation Measures

Users of ThimPress WP Pipes are advised to apply the vendor patch immediately to mitigate this vulnerability. If a patch cannot be applied immediately, a Web Application Firewall (WAF) or Intrusion Detection System (IDS) can be used as temporary mitigation. It’s important to note that these are temporary measures and should not replace the need to apply vendor patches. Patches are the most effective way to remediate vulnerabilities as they directly address and rectify the underlying issue in the software.