CVE-2025-10745

The Banhammer – Monitor Site Traffic, Block Bad Users and Bots plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Blocking Bypass in all versions up to, and including, 3.4.8. This is due to a site-wide “secret key” being deterministically generated from a constant character set using md5() and base64_encode() and then stored in the banhammer_secret_key option. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to bypass the plugin’s logging and blocking by appending a GET parameter named banhammer-process_{SECRET} where {SECRET} is the predictable value, thereby causing Banhammer to abort its protections for that request.

Weakness

The product uses insufficiently random numbers or values in a security context that depends on unpredictable numbers.

Potential Mitigations

• Use a well-vetted algorithm that is currently considered to be strong by experts in the field, and select well-tested implementations with adequate length seeds.
• In general, if a pseudo-random number generator is not advertised as being cryptographically secure, then it is probably a statistical PRNG and should not be used in security-sensitive contexts.
• Pseudo-random number generators can produce predictable numbers if the generator is known and the seed can be guessed. A 256-bit seed is a good starting point for producing a “random enough” number.

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/112.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/485.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/59.html

References

• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/banhammer/trunk/inc/banhammer-core.php#L101
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/banhammer/trunk/inc/banhammer-functions.php#L336
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset?sfp_email=\u0026sfph_mail=\u0026reponame=\u0026old=3365087%40banhammer\u0026new=3365087%40banhammer\u0026sfp_email=\u0026sfph_mail=
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset?sfp_email=\u0026sfph_mail=\u0026reponame=\u0026old=3365979%40banhammer\u0026new=3365979%40banhammer\u0026sfp_email=\u0026sfph_mail=
• https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/97c46a13-6981-426f-b24a-c9820657042f?source=cve