CVE-2025-9944 is a Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability affecting the Professional Contact Form plugin for WordPress, developed by kelderic. This vulnerability exists in all versions up to and including 1.0.0 due to missing or incorrect nonce validation in the function watch_for_contact_form_submit. Nonce validation is a security mechanism used in WordPress to ensure that requests made to perform actions are legitimate and initiated by authenticated users. The absence or improper implementation of this validation allows an unauthenticated attacker to craft a malicious request that, if an authenticated site administrator is tricked into clicking a specially crafted link or visiting a malicious webpage, can trigger the sending of test emails via the contact form. This attack vector leverages the trust relationship between the administrator's browser and the WordPress site, exploiting the administrator's active session to perform unintended actions. The vulnerability does not allow direct compromise of confidentiality or availability but can lead to integrity issues by enabling unauthorized actions to be performed on behalf of the administrator. The CVSS v3.1 base score is 4.3 (medium severity), reflecting that the attack requires user interaction (UI:R), no privileges (PR:N), and has no impact on confidentiality or availability but some impact on integrity (I:L). There are no known exploits in the wild at the time of publication, and no patches have been released yet. The vulnerability is categorized under CWE-352, which is a common web application security weakness related to CSRF attacks.

For European organizations using WordPress sites with the Professional Contact Form plugin, this vulnerability poses a moderate risk. While it does not directly compromise sensitive data confidentiality or cause denial of service, it can be exploited to send unauthorized test emails, potentially leading to spam or phishing campaigns originating from trusted domains. This could damage organizational reputation and trust. Additionally, if attackers combine this CSRF vulnerability with other weaknesses, they might escalate attacks or perform further malicious actions. European organizations with public-facing WordPress sites, especially those in sectors like government, finance, healthcare, or e-commerce, where trust and communication integrity are critical, could be targeted. The requirement for an administrator to be tricked into clicking a malicious link means that social engineering is a key component of exploitation, which is a common attack vector in Europe. The impact is thus more reputational and operational rather than direct data breach or service disruption.

To mitigate this vulnerability, European organizations should immediately audit their WordPress installations for the presence of the Professional Contact Form plugin and verify the version in use. Until an official patch is released, administrators should consider disabling or removing the plugin to eliminate the attack surface. If disabling the plugin is not feasible, organizations should implement compensating controls such as: 1) Educating administrators and users about the risks of clicking unsolicited or suspicious links, especially when logged into administrative accounts. 2) Implementing web application firewalls (WAFs) with rules to detect and block CSRF attack patterns or suspicious POST requests targeting the contact form endpoint. 3) Enforcing multi-factor authentication (MFA) for WordPress administrator accounts to reduce the risk of session hijacking and unauthorized actions. 4) Monitoring logs for unusual email sending activity or unexpected POST requests to the plugin's endpoints. 5) Applying strict Content Security Policy (CSP) headers to limit the ability of malicious sites to execute scripts or forge requests. Organizations should also subscribe to vendor and security advisories to promptly apply patches once available.