CVE-2025-62950: 
WordPress vulnerability analysis and mitigation

CVE-2025-62950 is a Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the WordPress Contest Gallery plugin developed by Wasiliy Strecker / ContestGallery developer. It affects all versions of the plugin up to and including 28.0.0, and was discovered and reported by Lorenzo Camilli via Patchstack's Active VDP program on October 12, 2025, with public disclosure on November 6, 2025. The vulnerability carries a CVSS v3.1 base score of 4.3 (Medium) (Patchstack VDP, Red Hat CVE).

The vulnerability is classified as CWE-352 (Cross-Site Request Forgery) and stems from insufficient or missing CSRF token validation on one or more plugin actions within the Contest Gallery WordPress plugin. An unauthenticated attacker can craft a malicious web page or link that, when visited by an authenticated WordPress user (such as an administrator), causes the victim's browser to submit unauthorized requests to the WordPress site on their behalf. Exploitation requires user interaction — specifically, a privileged user must be tricked into clicking a malicious link or visiting a crafted page while authenticated (Patchstack VDP).

Successful exploitation allows a malicious actor to force higher-privileged users to execute unwanted actions under their current authentication context, resulting in unauthorized modifications to plugin settings or site content. The CVSS assessment indicates a low integrity impact with no confidentiality or availability impact, limiting the practical damage to unauthorized state-changing actions within the plugin's scope. Lateral movement or data exfiltration are not directly facilitated by this vulnerability (Patchstack VDP).

No public proof-of-concept exploit code or evidence of in-the-wild exploitation has been reported for CVE-2025-62950. The EPSS score is approximately 0.014% (0.000140), indicating a very low probability of exploitation in the near term. The vulnerability is not listed in the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. Patchstack notes that while CSRF vulnerabilities of this type can be used in mass-exploit campaigns targeting WordPress plugins, the low severity and required user interaction reduce the practical risk (Patchstack VDP).

1. Reconnaissance: Identify WordPress sites running the Contest Gallery plugin at version 28.0.0 or earlier using tools like WPScan or Shodan.
2. Craft malicious request: Construct an HTML page or link containing a forged form or AJAX request targeting a vulnerable Contest Gallery plugin action endpoint (e.g., an admin-facing action URL) without a valid CSRF nonce.
3. Social engineering: Deliver the malicious link or page to an authenticated WordPress administrator or privileged user via phishing email, comment, or other social engineering vector.
4. Trigger exploitation: When the victim visits the crafted page while authenticated, their browser automatically submits the forged request, causing the plugin to execute the unauthorized action under the victim's session credentials.
5. Achieve objective: The attacker achieves unauthorized modification of plugin settings or contest data, depending on which action was targeted (Patchstack VDP).

• Logs: WordPress access logs showing unexpected POST requests to Contest Gallery plugin admin action endpoints from unusual referrer origins or with missing/invalid nonce parameters.
• Application: Unexplained changes to Contest Gallery plugin settings, contest configurations, or gallery entries without corresponding administrator activity.
• Network: Requests to WordPress admin-ajax.php or plugin-specific endpoints originating from external or unexpected referrer domains.

The vendor has released version 28.0.1 of the Contest Gallery plugin, which patches this vulnerability. Site administrators should update to version 28.0.1 or later immediately via the WordPress plugin dashboard. Patchstack users can enable auto-update for vulnerable plugins as an additional safeguard. No configuration-based workaround is available; updating is the only recommended remediation (Patchstack VDP).