CVE-2025-4606 in Sala Theme
Summary
by MITRE • 07/09/2025
The Sala - Startup & SaaS WordPress Theme theme for WordPress is vulnerable to privilege escalation via account takeover in all versions up to, and including, 1.1.4. This is due to the theme not properly validating a user's identity prior to updating their details like password. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to change arbitrary user's passwords, including administrators, and leverage that to gain access to their account.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 07/09/2025
The CVE-2025-4606 vulnerability affects the Sala - Startup & SaaS WordPress Theme, a popular theme used for building business and SaaS websites. This theme has been identified as containing a critical privilege escalation flaw that allows unauthenticated attackers to take control of user accounts, including those with administrative privileges. The vulnerability exists in all versions up to and including 1.1.4, making it a widespread concern for WordPress site owners who have not updated their theme installations. The flaw stems from inadequate user identity validation mechanisms within the theme's password update functionality, creating a significant security gap that can be exploited by malicious actors without requiring any prior authentication credentials.
The technical implementation of this vulnerability lies in the theme's failure to properly authenticate user requests when processing password updates. Specifically, the theme does not validate whether the user requesting a password change is the legitimate owner of the account they are attempting to modify. This validation gap allows attackers to craft malicious requests that bypass normal authentication procedures, enabling them to update any user's password without proper authorization. The vulnerability creates a direct path for attackers to escalate their privileges by taking control of administrative accounts, which would otherwise require sophisticated social engineering or other authentication bypass techniques. This flaw operates at the application layer and represents a classic case of insufficient access control validation, which aligns with CWE-285 Access Control issues.
The operational impact of this vulnerability is severe and multifaceted, as it directly enables unauthorized account takeover and privilege escalation attacks. An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to gain full administrative control over WordPress sites using the affected theme, potentially leading to complete system compromise, data exfiltration, and unauthorized modifications to website content. The vulnerability's exploitable nature means that any WordPress site running an affected version of the Sala theme is immediately at risk, regardless of other security measures in place. This creates a significant threat surface that can be exploited by automated attack tools, making the impact particularly dangerous for high-traffic or mission-critical websites that rely on the theme for their presentation and functionality.
Organizations and WordPress site administrators should immediately update to the latest version of the Sala theme to remediate this vulnerability, as no known workarounds exist for the specific flaw. The recommended mitigation strategy involves thorough patch management procedures, including verifying theme versions across all installations and implementing automated monitoring for vulnerable components. Security teams should also conduct comprehensive vulnerability assessments to identify all instances of the affected theme across their infrastructure. Additionally, implementing additional security controls such as two-factor authentication, rate limiting on authentication requests, and monitoring for unusual password change activities can help detect and prevent exploitation attempts. This vulnerability demonstrates the importance of maintaining current theme versions and highlights the risks associated with using outdated WordPress themes that may contain unpatched security flaws, aligning with ATT&CK technique T1078 Valid Accounts and T1566 Phishing.