Overview
The cybersecurity community has identified a vulnerability in the “RH – Real Estate WordPress Theme”, a popular theme for WordPress sites. This theme is widely used across real estate websites, and its vulnerability could potentially impact numerous users and website owners. The identified vulnerability enables privilege escalation, allowing attackers with minimal access to gain administrator rights, potentially compromising systems or causing data leakage. Given the severity of this vulnerability, it is critical for users and system administrators to understand its implications and take appropriate mitigation steps.
Vulnerability Summary
CVE ID: CVE-2025-4601
Severity: High (8.8 CVSS score)
Attack Vector: Network
Privileges Required: Low (Subscriber-level access)
User Interaction: Required
Impact: System Compromise and Potential Data Leakage
Affected Products
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Product | Affected Versions
RH – Real Estate WordPress Theme | Up to and including 4.4.0
How the Exploit Works
The vulnerability lies in the inspiry_update_profile() function of the theme. This function does not properly restrict the user roles that can be updated. Consequently, an attacker with subscriber-level access can exploit this weakness to assign themselves an administrator role. With administrator rights, the attacker can then execute actions that could lead to system compromise or data leakage.
Conceptual Example Code
Here is a conceptual example of how this vulnerability might be exploited. This pseudocode illustrates how an attacker might send a POST request to change their user role to ‘administrator’.
POST /wp-admin/profile.php HTTP/1.1
Host: target.example.com
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
username=attacker&role=administrator&password=secretIn the above pseudocode, ‘attacker’ is the username of the attacker, ‘administrator’ is the role they wish to escalate to, and ‘secret’ is their password.
Solution and Mitigations
The vulnerability was fully patched in version 4.4.1 of the RH – Real Estate WordPress Theme. Users are advised to update their theme to this version or a later one. If an immediate update is not possible, using a Web Application Firewall (WAF) or an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) can serve as a temporary mitigation measure. These can help detect and prevent exploitation attempts while the system is still vulnerable.