CVE-2025-32144: Serious Deserialization Vulnerability in PickPlugins Job Board Manager

Overview

CVE-2025-32144 represents a critical vulnerability discovered in the Job Board Manager plugin developed by PickPlugins. This vulnerability, classified as a deserialization of untrusted data, poses significant risks to both the integrity and confidentiality of systems that have the affected plugin installed. As the Job Board Manager is a popular choice among businesses for managing job postings and candidate applications, the potential repercussions of this vulnerability are vast, affecting a wide range of industries and sectors.
The primary concern with this vulnerability is its potential for facilitating system compromise and data leakage. Given the sensitive nature of the data typically handled by Job Board Manager, including personal and professional information of job candidates, the risks associated with this vulnerability are heightened.

Vulnerability Summary

CVE ID: CVE-2025-32144
Severity: High (8.8 CVSS Severity Score)
Attack Vector: Network
Privileges Required: Low
User Interaction: None
Impact: Potential system compromise and data leakage

Affected Products

Product | Affected Versions

PickPlugins Job Board Manager | n/a through 2.1.60

How the Exploit Works

The exploit takes advantage of a deserialization vulnerability in the Job Board Manager. Deserialization is the process of converting a stream of bytes back into a copy of the original object. If an attacker can serialize (convert the object into a byte stream) a malicious object and get the server to deserialize it, they can potentially execute arbitrary code.
The vulnerability arises when the plugin deserializes user-supplied data without proper validation or sanitization. This allows an attacker to inject malicious serialized objects into the data stream, which, when deserialized, can lead to object injection attacks.

Conceptual Example Code

This conceptual example demonstrates how an attacker might exploit this vulnerability by sending a malicious payload to a vulnerable endpoint:

POST /jobboard/submit_application HTTP/1.1
Host: target.example.com
Content-Type: application/json
{ "applicant_resume": "serialized_malicious_object_here" }

In this example, `serialized_malicious_object_here` would be replaced with a serialized object that includes malicious code. When the server deserializes this object, the malicious code is executed, allowing the attacker to compromise the system or exfiltrate sensitive data.