CVE-2025-21181
Published: 11 February 2025
Summary
CVE-2025-21181 is a high-severity Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (CWE-400) vulnerability in Microsoft Windows Server 2008. Its CVSS base score is 7.5 (High).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Network Denial of Service (T1498); ranked in the top 5.6% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
The strongest mitigations our analysis identified are NIST 800-53 SC-5 (Denial-of-service Protection) and SC-6 (Resource Availability).
Deeper analysis
Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) contains a denial-of-service vulnerability tracked as CVE-2025-21181. The flaw is rooted in uncontrolled resource consumption (CWE-400) and affects the MSMQ service on Windows systems. It carries a CVSS 3.1 base score of 7.5, reflecting network attack vector, low complexity, and no required privileges or user interaction, with the primary impact being high availability loss while confidentiality and integrity remain unaffected.
An unauthenticated remote attacker can send specially crafted network messages to an exposed MSMQ endpoint, triggering excessive resource consumption that renders the service unavailable. Successful exploitation requires no authentication or user interaction, allowing an adversary to disrupt message queuing operations across an enterprise without prior access.
Microsoft’s Security Response Center advisory at msrc.microsoft.com provides official guidance and patches, while Vicarius has published accompanying detection and mitigation scripts to help organizations identify affected MSMQ instances and apply workarounds until updates are deployed.
EPSS for the CVE rose from lower values to a peak of 0.2713 on 2025-12-11 before receding to the current 0.1358, indicating a period of increased exploitation interest after disclosure.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2025-2260
Vulnerability details
Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) Denial of Service Vulnerability
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise TechniquesAI
Why these techniques?
Remote unauthenticated network exploitation of MSMQ for resource exhaustion directly enables Network Denial of Service (T1498).
CVEs Like This One
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5) AI
Flaw remediation requires applying Microsoft's patch to directly eliminate the uncontrolled resource consumption vulnerability in MSMQ.
Denial-of-service protection implements rate limiting and traffic filtering at entry points to block resource exhaustion attacks on MSMQ.
Resource availability enforces usage limits and monitoring thresholds to prevent MSMQ from being overwhelmed by uncontrolled consumption.