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 5.7% 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).
Threat & Defense at a Glance
Threat & Defense Details
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.
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise TechniquesAI
Why these techniques?
Remote unauthenticated network exploitation of MSMQ for resource exhaustion directly enables Network Denial of Service (T1498).
NVD Description
Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) Denial of Service Vulnerability
Deeper analysisAI
CVE-2025-21181 is a Denial of Service vulnerability in Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ), published on 2025-02-11T18:15:29.553. It carries a CVSS v3.1 base score of 7.5 (AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H) and is linked to CWE-400 (Uncontrolled Resource Consumption) as well as NVD-CWE-noinfo.
The vulnerability allows an unauthenticated attacker with network access to exploit MSMQ remotely with low attack complexity and no user interaction. Successful exploitation results in a high-impact denial of service, disrupting service availability without compromising confidentiality or integrity.
Microsoft's update guide at https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2025-21181 details patching instructions. Vicarius provides a detection script at https://www.vicarius.io/vsociety/posts/cve-2025-21181-denial-of-service-vulnerability-in-microsoft-message-queuing-detection-script and a mitigation script at https://www.vicarius.io/vsociety/posts/cve-2025-21181-denial-of-service-vulnerability-in-microsoft-message-queuing-mitigation-script.
Details
- CWE(s)