CVE-2025-57978 is a Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability identified in the themespride Advanced Appointment Booking & Scheduling plugin, affecting versions up to 1.9. CSRF vulnerabilities allow an attacker to trick an authenticated user into submitting a forged request to a web application in which the user is currently authenticated. This can result in unauthorized actions being performed without the user's consent. In this case, the vulnerability exists because the plugin does not properly validate the origin or authenticity of requests that modify booking or scheduling data. The CVSS 3.1 base score is 4.3, indicating a medium severity level. The vector string (AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N) shows that the attack can be performed remotely over the network with low attack complexity, requires no privileges, but does require user interaction (such as clicking a malicious link). The impact is limited to integrity, meaning unauthorized changes to booking or scheduling data could occur, but confidentiality and availability are not affected. No known exploits are reported in the wild, and no patches or fixes have been linked yet. The vulnerability is categorized under CWE-352, which is a well-known web security weakness related to CSRF attacks. Since the affected product is a booking and scheduling plugin, exploitation could lead to unauthorized appointment modifications, cancellations, or bookings, potentially disrupting business operations or causing reputational damage.

For European organizations using the themespride Advanced Appointment Booking & Scheduling plugin, this vulnerability could lead to unauthorized manipulation of appointment data. This may disrupt service delivery, cause confusion for customers, and damage trust in the organization’s online booking systems. Sectors such as healthcare, professional services, education, and any customer-facing businesses relying on online scheduling could be impacted. While the vulnerability does not directly expose sensitive data or cause denial of service, the integrity compromise could lead to operational inefficiencies and customer dissatisfaction. Additionally, organizations subject to GDPR must consider the reputational and compliance risks if appointment data integrity is compromised, as this could indirectly affect personal data processing. The lack of authentication requirements for the attacker lowers the barrier to exploitation, increasing risk, especially if users can be socially engineered to interact with malicious content.

To mitigate this CSRF vulnerability, European organizations should implement the following specific measures: 1) Immediately review and apply any available patches or updates from themespride once released. 2) If patches are not yet available, implement web application firewall (WAF) rules to detect and block suspicious CSRF-like requests targeting the booking endpoints. 3) Enforce strict SameSite cookie attributes (preferably SameSite=Strict) to reduce the risk of cross-origin requests being accepted by the browser. 4) Educate users and staff about the risks of clicking on suspicious links or visiting untrusted websites while authenticated to the booking system. 5) Conduct a thorough audit of the booking system’s request validation mechanisms and add anti-CSRF tokens or nonce validation if possible. 6) Monitor logs for unusual booking or scheduling changes that could indicate exploitation attempts. 7) Consider isolating the booking system behind additional authentication or network segmentation to limit exposure. These steps go beyond generic advice by focusing on compensating controls and user awareness until an official patch is available.