CVE-2025-3453

Password Protected – Password Protect your WordPress Site, Pages, & WooCommerce Products <= 2.7.7 - Unauthenticated Sensitive Information Exposure

2025-04-16 00:00
Brian Sans-Souci (liardom)

Strategic Overview

Status
Patched in 2.7.8
Affected Plugin
Password Protected — Lock Entire Site, Pages, Posts, Categories, and Partial Content
Affected Version
<= 2.7.7
CVSS
5.3Medium
Weakness type
CWE-863 · Incorrect Authorization
CVE
CVE-2025-3453
View all Password Protected — Lock Entire Site, Pages, Posts, Categories, and Partial Content vulnerabilities

At a glance

CVE-2025-3453 is a medium-severity Incorrect Authorization vulnerability in the Password Protected WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 2.7.7. It carries a CVSS score of 5.3 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity). Exploitation requires no authentication. The issue is fixed in version 2.7.8; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed April 2025, reported by Brian Sans-Souci (liardom).

Vulnerability Overview

The Password Protected – Password Protect your WordPress Site, Pages, & WooCommerce Products – Restrict Content, Protect WooCommerce Category and more plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Sensitive Information Exposure in all versions up to, and including, 2.7.7 via the 'password_protected_cookie' function. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to extract sensitive data including all protected site content if the 'Use Transient' setting is enabled.

Technical Analysis

The vector marks this flaw as remotely reachable over the network, with low attack complexity — no special timing or configuration is needed, and no privileges on the target site, and no interaction from a victim user.

CWE-863: Incorrect Authorization

Password Protected <= 2.7.7 carries this weakness at password_protected_cookie, and reaching it takes no account at all. Incorrect authorization means a permission check exists but evaluates the wrong thing, so it passes for callers it was meant to stop.

The action runs for users the code intended to exclude, with the same effect as having no check at all. For Password Protected the fix is 2.7.8: builds <= 2.7.7 are affected, anything from 2.7.8 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 2.7.8, or a newer patched version

How does WordSec protect against this?

This one needs no account at all, which puts it outside what login hardening can reach; WordSec's login security narrows the account-level paths around it, and the firewall is what inspects the request itself. None of that substitutes for the fix: Password Protected 2.7.8 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

  • Login Security
  • Alerts

External References

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-3453https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/241d75ca-55e3-461a-9844-52e69904da1bhttps://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-3453

Related records

Vulnerability data © Defiant, Inc., provided under the Wordfence Intelligence T&C