CVE-2025-52825: Real Estate Manager CSRF Vulnerability

CVE-2025-52825 Overview

CVE-2025-52825 is a Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the Rameez Iqbal Real Estate Manager plugin for WordPress. The flaw affects all versions up to and including 7.3. An attacker who tricks an authenticated user into visiting a malicious page can force the browser to submit a forged request to the plugin, resulting in privilege escalation. The issue is tracked under CWE-352: Cross-Site Request Forgery and is documented in the Patchstack CSRF Vulnerability Report.

Critical Impact

Successful exploitation allows an attacker to escalate privileges within a WordPress site, potentially gaining administrator-level access and full control over site content and configuration.

Affected Products

• Rameez Iqbal Real Estate Manager plugin for WordPress
• All versions from n/a through 7.3
• WordPress sites with the real-estate-manager plugin installed and active

Discovery Timeline

• 2025-06-20 - CVE-2025-52825 published to NVD
• 2026-04-23 - Last updated in NVD database

Technical Details for CVE-2025-52825

Vulnerability Analysis

The Real Estate Manager plugin fails to validate the origin of state-changing HTTP requests. State-changing endpoints in the plugin do not enforce anti-CSRF nonces or equivalent request verification. When an authenticated WordPress user, particularly an administrator, loads attacker-controlled content, the browser is coerced into issuing a request that the plugin processes as legitimate.

The specific impact is privilege escalation, indicating that one or more sensitive actions, such as user role changes or account creation, are reachable without proper CSRF protection. The vulnerability requires user interaction but does not require attacker authentication, since the victim's session supplies the authority needed to perform the action.

Root Cause

The root cause is missing or improperly verified CSRF tokens on privileged actions exposed by the plugin. WordPress provides the wp_nonce_field() and check_admin_referer() APIs to mitigate this class of issue, but the affected handlers in real-estate-manager up to version 7.3 do not enforce these checks before performing privilege-altering operations.

Attack Vector

An attacker hosts a crafted page containing an auto-submitting form or fetch request targeting the vulnerable plugin endpoint on the victim's WordPress site. The attacker delivers this page through phishing, malvertising, or comments on a third-party site. When a logged-in administrator visits the page, the browser sends the forged request with valid session cookies. The plugin processes the request and applies the privilege change requested by the attacker.

No verified public proof-of-concept code is available for this issue. See the Patchstack advisory for technical details.

Detection Methods for CVE-2025-52825

Indicators of Compromise

• Unexpected WordPress user accounts with administrative or elevated roles created without an audit trail
• Role changes on existing accounts that do not correlate with administrator activity in WordPress logs
• HTTP POST requests to real-estate-manager plugin endpoints originating from external Referer headers
• Sudden plugin or option changes following an administrator visiting an external link

Detection Strategies

• Inspect web server access logs for requests to plugin action endpoints where the Referer header points to a domain outside the WordPress site.
• Correlate WordPress user role changes in the wp_usermeta table with the timing of inbound requests to plugin endpoints.
• Alert on creation of new administrator accounts that occur outside known administrative workflows.
• Monitor for repeated POST requests to plugin URLs lacking expected nonce parameters in the body or query string.

Monitoring Recommendations

• Forward WordPress audit logs and web server logs to a central SIEM or data lake for correlation with browser session activity.
• Track plugin version inventory across WordPress sites and flag any host running real-estate-manager at version 7.3 or earlier.
• Enable file integrity monitoring on the WordPress installation to capture unexpected plugin or option database modifications.

How to Mitigate CVE-2025-52825

Immediate Actions Required

• Identify all WordPress instances running the Real Estate Manager plugin and confirm the installed version.
• Upgrade the real-estate-manager plugin to a version later than 7.3 once a patched release is available from the vendor.
• Audit WordPress user accounts and roles for unauthorized privilege changes or new administrator accounts.
• Force a password reset and session invalidation for all administrator accounts on affected sites.

Patch Information

The vulnerability affects Real Estate Manager versions through 7.3. Refer to the Patchstack advisory for the current patch status and apply the vendor-supplied fix as soon as it is published.

Workarounds

• Deactivate and remove the Real Estate Manager plugin on sites where it is not required until a patched version is installed.
• Deploy a web application firewall rule that blocks POST requests to plugin endpoints when the Referer header is missing or originates from an external domain.
• Restrict administrator access to dedicated browsers or sessions that are not used for general web browsing to reduce CSRF exposure.
• Enforce least privilege on WordPress accounts so that day-to-day editing does not occur from administrator-level sessions.

# Example WAF rule (ModSecurity) to block cross-origin POSTs to the plugin
SecRule REQUEST_METHOD "@streq POST" \
  "chain,id:1052825,phase:2,deny,status:403,msg:'CVE-2025-52825 CSRF block'"
  SecRule REQUEST_URI "@contains /wp-admin/admin.php" "chain"
  SecRule ARGS:page "@rm real-estate-manager" "chain"
  SecRule REQUEST_HEADERS:Referer "!@beginsWith https://your-wordpress-site.example/"