CVE-2025-70041
Published: 11 March 2026
Summary
CVE-2025-70041 is a critical-severity Use of Hard-coded Password (CWE-259) vulnerability. Its CVSS base score is 9.8 (Critical).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Valid Accounts (T1078); ranked at the 18.0th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
The strongest mitigations our analysis identified are NIST 800-53 IA-5 (Authenticator Management) and SA-15 (Development Process, Standards, and Tools).
Threat & Defense at a Glance
Threat & Defense Details
Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5)AI
IA-5 requires proper management of authenticators including prohibiting hard-coded passwords through secure distribution, rotation, and protection to prevent unauthorized access.
SA-15 mandates developer use of standards, tools, and processes such as secure coding practices and code reviews that prohibit embedding hard-coded passwords in software like ThermaKube.
SI-2 ensures flaws like the hard-coded password in CVE-2025-70041 are identified, prioritized, and remediated promptly to mitigate exploitation risks.
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise TechniquesAI
Why these techniques?
Hard-coded password directly enables use of valid accounts for remote unauthorized access (T1078) to a publicly exposed application (T1190).
NVD Description
An issue pertaining to CWE-259: Use of Hard-coded Password was discovered in oslabs-beta ThermaKube master.
Deeper analysisAI
CVE-2025-70041, published on 2026-03-11, involves a use of hard-coded password issue (CWE-259) discovered in the master branch of oslabs-beta ThermaKube. This vulnerability affects the ThermaKube software component developed by oslabs-beta, earning a critical CVSS v3.1 base score of 9.8 due to its severe impact potential.
The vulnerability enables exploitation over the network (AV:N) with low complexity (AC:L), requiring no privileges (PR:N) or user interaction (UI:N), and without changing scope (S:U). Attackers can achieve high impacts on confidentiality (C:H), integrity (I:H), and availability (A:H), potentially allowing unauthorized access to sensitive functions, data exfiltration, system modification, or denial of service on affected ThermaKube instances.
References for further details include a GitHub Gist at https://gist.github.com/zcxlighthouse/cbd6fd6ca486460573e0611ee547f763, the oslabs-beta organization page at https://github.com/oslabs-beta, and the ThermaKube repository at https://github.com/oslabs-beta/ThermaKube. No specific mitigation steps or patches are outlined in the available CVE information.
Details
- CWE(s)