CVE-2025-5931 is a high-severity privilege escalation vulnerability affecting the Dokan Pro plugin for WordPress, versions up to and including 4.0.5. Dokan Pro is a popular multi-vendor marketplace plugin that allows customers to become vendors by default. The vulnerability arises from improper privilege management (CWE-269) during the staff password reset process. Specifically, the plugin fails to properly validate the identity of a user before allowing a password update. This flaw enables authenticated attackers who already have vendor-level access or higher to escalate their privileges to staff level. Once elevated, the attacker can change arbitrary user passwords, including those of administrators, thereby gaining full administrative control over the WordPress site. The vulnerability is remotely exploitable over the network (AV:N), requires low attack complexity (AC:L), and only requires privileges at the vendor level (PR:L) without any user interaction (UI:N). The impact on confidentiality, integrity, and availability is high (C:H/I:H/A:H), as the attacker can fully compromise the site, access sensitive data, modify content, and disrupt services. No public exploits are currently known in the wild, and no patches have been linked yet. The vulnerability was published on August 26, 2025, and is tracked under CWE-269 (Improper Privilege Management).

For European organizations using WordPress with the Dokan Pro plugin, this vulnerability poses a significant risk. Compromise of administrative accounts can lead to full site takeover, data breaches involving customer and vendor information, financial fraud through manipulation of marketplace transactions, and reputational damage. Given the plugin's role in enabling multi-vendor marketplaces, affected organizations could face disruption of e-commerce operations and loss of customer trust. Additionally, attackers could leverage compromised sites to distribute malware or conduct further attacks within the organization's network. The high CVSS score (8.8) reflects the severe potential impact. Organizations in sectors such as retail, e-commerce, and digital services, which commonly deploy WordPress-based marketplaces, are particularly at risk. The vulnerability's ease of exploitation and lack of required user interaction increase the likelihood of successful attacks if unmitigated.

1. Immediate action should include auditing all WordPress installations for the presence of the Dokan Pro plugin and identifying versions up to 4.0.5. 2. Until an official patch is released, restrict vendor-level user privileges to the minimum necessary and monitor for unusual password reset activities. 3. Implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all staff and administrator accounts to reduce the risk of account takeover. 4. Review and harden password reset workflows by enforcing strict identity verification mechanisms outside of the vulnerable plugin. 5. Employ web application firewalls (WAFs) with custom rules to detect and block suspicious privilege escalation attempts targeting the password reset functionality. 6. Monitor logs for anomalous changes to user accounts, especially password resets initiated by vendor-level users. 7. Plan for rapid deployment of patches once available from the vendor and test updates in a staging environment before production rollout. 8. Educate staff and users about the risk and encourage reporting of any suspicious activity related to account access.