CVE Alert: CVE-2025-9704 – SourceCodester – Water Billing System

Risk verdict

High risk with active remote exploitation potential due to publicly available exploit and unauthenticated SQL injection.

Why this matters

Attacks can reach the database without any user credentials, enabling data exposure, modification, or disruption of billing operations. Compromised customer data and billing integrity can trigger regulatory concerns and erode trust, especially where payment records are involved.

Most likely attack path

An external actor can target the web endpoint over the network, using crafted input for the ID parameter to trigger a SQL injection. The vulnerability requires no authentication and minimal user interaction, enabling automated or semi-automated exploitation to read or manipulate data. Scope remains within the application DB, but successful exploitation may permit lateral data access via poorly constrained queries.

Who is most exposed

Organizations running the Water Billing System 1.0 with internet-accessible management pages are at highest risk, particularly small to midsize deployments in public or hosted environments without strict input sanitisation.

Detection ideas

• SQL error messages or unusual DB errors in application responses following ID input.
• Anomalous payloads in requests to viewbill.php (e.g., UNION SELECT, tautologies, sleep-based tests).
• Web server logs showing repeated, automated probes targeting the ID parameter.
• WAF alerts for SQLi patterns on the affected endpoint.
• Database access logs showing unexpected query shapes from the application account.

Mitigation and prioritisation

• Apply vendor patch or upgrade to a fixed build; verify integrity of the vulnerable endpoint.
• If patching is not immediately possible, disable or tightly restrict the viewbill.php endpoint; implement input validation and parameterised queries.
• Enforce least-privilege DB credentials for the application and monitor for anomalous queries/exfiltration.
• Deploy a WAF rule to block typical SQLi patterns against the endpoint and enable detailed logging.
• Initiate change-management actions to validate fixes in staging before production.