CVE-2025-46171
Published: 23 July 2025
Summary
CVE-2025-46171 is a medium-severity Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (CWE-400) vulnerability in Vbulletin Vbulletin. Its CVSS base score is 5.4 (Medium).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Application or System Exploitation (T1499.004); ranked in the top 31.2% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog; a public proof-of-concept is referenced.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2025-22462
Vulnerability details
vBulletin 3.8.7 is vulnerable to a denial-of-service condition via the misc.php?do=buddylist endpoint. If an authenticated user has a sufficiently large buddy list, processing the list can consume excessive memory, exhausting system resources and crashing the forum.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise TechniquesAI
Why these techniques?
The vulnerability enables authenticated users to cause application resource exhaustion and crash the vBulletin forum via processing a large buddy list in a single SQL query, facilitating endpoint denial of service through application exploitation.
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
Likely Mitigating Controls AI
Per-CVE control mapping for this CVE has not run yet; the list below is derived from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry.
Limiting concurrent sessions directly prevents uncontrolled resource consumption by capping the number of active sessions per user or account.
Analysis identifies uncontrolled resource consumption indicative of denial-of-service or abuse attempts.
Contingency plan testing includes resource exhaustion scenarios to verify recovery, making it harder for attackers to sustain exploits that cause uncontrolled consumption.
Updated contingency plans include current procedures to detect, contain, and recover from resource exhaustion, limiting an attacker's ability to sustain impact from uncontrolled consumption.
Alternate site allows resumption of operations if resource exhaustion at the primary site is exploited to cause unavailability.
Alternate telecommunications services enable resumption of essential functions when primary services become unavailable due to uncontrolled resource consumption.
The team can analyze and respond to resource exhaustion incidents, reducing the impact of attacks that exploit uncontrolled consumption weaknesses.
Timely maintenance support and spare parts enable rapid recovery from failures induced by uncontrolled resource consumption, shortening the impact window of denial-of-service attacks.