CVE Alert: CVE-2025-10688 – SourceCodester – Pet Grooming Management Software

Risk verdict

High risk with an unauthenticated, remotely accessible SQL injection exposed by a publicly disclosed PoC; treat as urgent due to potential data exposure.

Why this matters

Small businesses running this software could face data leakage, financial data manipulation, or service disruption through the billing/admin workflow. The vulnerability’s ability to impact confidentiality, integrity and availability means even partial damage to customer records or billing could erode trust and incur remediation costs.

Most likely attack path

No user credentials required; attacker can target the /admin/operation/paid.php entry point via the insta_amt parameter. Given PR:N and UI:N, exploitation can occur over the network with limited preconditions, enabling data exfiltration or record manipulation and possible basic lateral movement within the application’s data layer.

Who is most exposed

Typically deployed in small/medium shops as self-hosted PHP apps; internet-facing deployments with default or inadequate access controls are common—especially on older 1.0 releases.

Detection ideas

• Repeated suspicious queries to paid.php with anomalous insta_amt values
• Database error messages or unusual SQL syntax in responses
• WAF or IDS alerts for SQLi patterns targeting admin paths
• Unusual spikes in requests to the admin area from unauthorised IPs
• Logs showing failed or partial SQL errors during billing operations

Mitigation and prioritisation

• Apply vendor patch or upgrade to a non-affected version promptly
• Implement input validation and use parameterised queries; enforce least privilege on DB accounts
• Restrict admin endpoints behind authentication and network controls; consider WAF rules for SQLi
• Conduct staging tests before rollout; perform config audit of the admin interface
• If KEV/EPSS signals exist, treat as priority 1; otherwise allocate high priority given PoC availability and remote exploit risk.