CVE-2025-22645: Real Estate Manager Auth Bypass Flaw

CVE-2025-22645 Overview

CVE-2025-22645 is an improper restriction of excessive authentication attempts vulnerability [CWE-307] in the Rameez Iqbal Real Estate Manager plugin for WordPress. The flaw stems from a CAPTCHA bypass that allows attackers to brute force user passwords against the plugin's authentication endpoints. All versions of real-estate-manager up to and including 7.3 are affected. The vulnerability is exploitable over the network without authentication or user interaction, giving unauthenticated attackers a path to compromise valid credentials on affected WordPress sites.

Critical Impact
Unauthenticated attackers can perform automated password brute forcing against WordPress sites running the Real Estate Manager plugin, leading to potential account takeover of agents and administrators.

Affected Products

Rameez Iqbal Real Estate Manager (real-estate-manager) WordPress plugin
All versions from n/a through <= 7.3
WordPress installations using the Property Listing and Agent Management plugin

Discovery Timeline

2025-02-18 - CVE-2025-22645 published to NVD
2026-06-17 - Last updated in NVD database

Technical Details for CVE-2025-22645

Vulnerability Analysis

The Real Estate Manager plugin implements a CAPTCHA control intended to rate-limit authentication attempts and prevent automated login abuse. The plugin fails to properly enforce this control, allowing attackers to submit repeated login requests without triggering the anti-automation mechanism. This breaks the assumption that only human users can iterate through credential guesses at scale.

Because the plugin exposes agent and user login flows on public WordPress sites, the flaw directly enables credential stuffing and dictionary attacks. Successful exploitation compromises the integrity of accounts managed by the plugin without impacting confidentiality or availability of the underlying host.

Root Cause

The root cause is an improper restriction of excessive authentication attempts [CWE-307] combined with a CAPTCHA bypass in the plugin's login handler. The server-side code does not adequately validate the CAPTCHA token or track failed attempts per source, so brute force submissions are accepted as legitimate authentication traffic.

Attack Vector

An unauthenticated remote attacker sends crafted HTTP POST requests to the plugin's login endpoint while bypassing or omitting the expected CAPTCHA validation. Using automated tools, the attacker cycles through password candidates against known usernames. Because no rate limiting or account lockout is enforced, the attacker can sustain guessing until valid credentials are discovered.

No exploitation code is publicly available. Refer to the Patchstack Vulnerability Report for additional technical context.

Detection Methods for CVE-2025-22645

Indicators of Compromise

High volumes of POST requests to the Real Estate Manager plugin login endpoints from a single IP or small set of IPs.
Repeated authentication failures for the same or multiple usernames within short time windows.
Login requests that omit or reuse CAPTCHA parameters across sessions.
Successful logins immediately preceded by dozens or hundreds of failed attempts.

Detection Strategies

Parse WordPress and web server access logs for repeated hits to wp-admin, wp-login.php, and plugin-specific authentication routes tied to real-estate-manager.
Alert on authentication failure rates exceeding a baseline threshold per source IP or per user account.
Correlate User-Agent strings and IP reputation data to identify automated brute forcing tools.

Monitoring Recommendations

Ingest WordPress authentication logs into a centralized SIEM for continuous analysis.
Track new administrative logins from unfamiliar geolocations or ASNs.
Monitor for post-authentication actions such as user role changes, new admin creation, or theme and plugin edits.

How to Mitigate CVE-2025-22645

Immediate Actions Required

Update the Real Estate Manager plugin to a version later than 7.3 once the vendor releases a fix.
Force password resets for all agent and administrator accounts on affected sites.
Enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all WordPress users to blunt brute force success.
Deploy a web application firewall (WAF) rule to rate-limit requests to plugin login endpoints.

Patch Information

At the time of publication, the Patchstack Vulnerability Report tracks version 7.3 and earlier as vulnerable. Site administrators should monitor the plugin's WordPress.org page and apply the vendor patch as soon as it becomes available.

Workarounds

Temporarily disable the Real Estate Manager plugin if login functionality is not essential.
Restrict access to plugin login pages by IP allowlist at the web server or WAF layer.
Implement account lockout policies through a hardening plugin such as Limit Login Attempts Reloaded.
Add server-side rate limiting on wp-login.php and plugin authentication routes via fail2ban or equivalent tooling.

bash

# Example fail2ban filter snippet for WordPress brute force mitigation
# /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/wordpress-auth.conf
[Definition]
failregex = ^<HOST> .* "POST /wp-login.php.*" 200
            ^<HOST> .* "POST /.*real-estate-manager.*" 200
ignoreregex =