The Ultimate Dashboard plugin is a popular tool for customizing the WordPress admin dashboard, used by site owners and developers to enhance the client experience with personalized widgets, custom admin pages, and visual tweaks. However, in versions prior to 3.8.6, the plugin was affected by a Stored Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability that could lead to privilege escalation, including unauthorized admin account creation.
This vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-1524, represents a critical example of how seemingly innocuous customization features can become attack vectors when proper sanitization is not enforced.