Executive brief
The Restaurant Menu and Food Ordering WordPress plugin used to process food orders and payments does not properly verify PayPal payment notifications. This allows attackers to forge a payment confirmation and mark orders as paid without actually paying, enabling free meals and direct revenue loss for restaurant operators using the plugin.
Technical details
The plugin implements a PayPal IPN (Instant Payment Notification) listener that fails to verify that incoming payment notifications genuinely originate from PayPal's servers. Specifically, the vulnerable component does not validate the notification by performing the required POST-back verification step that PayPal requires. An unauthenticated attacker with knowledge of an order ID, purchase key, order total, and merchant PayPal email (all publicly visible on the storefront) can craft and send a forged IPN notification to the listener endpoint to mark any pending order as completed without making payment. The attack requires the PayPal Standard gateway to be enabled but no authentication or CSRF tokens. The vulnerability was fixed in version 2.4.12.
Affected products
- MotoPress Restaurant Menu and Food Ordering before 2.4.12
Timeline
- 2026-09-02: disclosed
- 2026-09-04: patched: Fixed in version 2.4.12