# Essential Real Estate <= 5.3.5 - Authenticated (Subscriber+) Arbitrary Email Sending via Contact Agent Form

- **ID:** WPSEC-2026-2940
- **Plugin:** Essential Real Estate (`essential-real-estate`), https://wordpress.org/plugins/essential-real-estate/
- **Affected versions:** from 5.3.5 before 5.3.6
- **Fixed in:** 5.3.6 (Update to 5.3.6 or later.)
- **Severity:** Medium 4.3 (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N)
- **Weakness:** CWE-863
- **Usage among sites WPSec scans:** plugin Low, affected versions None seen (as of 2026-11-12)
- **Attack surface analysis:** https://attacksurface.wpsec.com/plugin/essential-real-estate
- **Fix released:** 2026-11-10
- **Published:** 2026-11-12
- **URL:** https://wpsec.com/vuln/WPSEC-2026-2940/

## Description

The Essential Real Estate plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to arbitrary email sending via the contact agent form (ere_contact_agent_ajax AJAX action) in all versions up to, and including, 5.3.5, due to an incomplete fix. The recipient is still taken from the 'target_email' request parameter, and the check that it is a known contact address accepts addresses that users control without verification: the 'Other contact' email of any published property, agent email addresses, and the account email of property authors. Account emails can be set through registration or a front-end profile change with no confirmation from the address owner. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with subscriber-level access and above, to make any email address an accepted recipient, for example by publishing a property through the front-end form, and then use the site to send messages to that address.

## References

- https://wpsec.com/vuln/WPSEC-2026-2940/
- https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/essential-real-estate/tags/5.3.6/
- https://wordpress.org/plugins/essential-real-estate/

Source: WPSec, https://wpsec.com/vuln/WPSEC-2026-2940/

License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Free to use, share and adapt, also commercially, if you credit WPSec and link to this advisory.