CVE-2025-36047 is a vulnerability classified under CWE-770, which involves the allocation of resources without proper limits or throttling, specifically in IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty versions from 18.0.0.2 through 25.0.0.8. The flaw allows a remote attacker to send specially crafted requests that cause the server to consume excessive memory resources. This uncontrolled resource consumption can lead to denial of service (DoS) conditions by exhausting available memory, potentially causing the server to slow down, become unresponsive, or crash. The vulnerability requires no authentication or user interaction, making it remotely exploitable over the network with low complexity. The CVSS v3.1 score of 5.3 reflects a medium severity, indicating a moderate impact primarily on availability, with no direct impact on confidentiality or integrity. No known public exploits have been reported yet, but the vulnerability poses a risk to environments running affected versions of WebSphere Liberty, which is a popular Java EE application server used in enterprise and cloud deployments. The lack of throttling or limits on resource allocation in request handling is the root cause, highlighting a design weakness in managing memory consumption under malicious input conditions.

For European organizations, the primary impact of CVE-2025-36047 is the potential disruption of critical business applications hosted on IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty. Denial of service attacks exploiting this vulnerability could lead to service outages, affecting availability of web applications, APIs, and backend services. This can result in operational downtime, loss of productivity, and potential financial losses, especially for sectors relying heavily on continuous service such as banking, government, telecommunications, and e-commerce. Additionally, service interruptions could damage organizational reputation and customer trust. Since the vulnerability does not affect confidentiality or integrity, data breaches are unlikely; however, the availability impact alone can be significant in high-demand environments. The absence of known exploits currently provides a window for proactive mitigation, but the ease of exploitation and remote nature of the attack vector necessitate urgent attention to prevent future attacks.

1. Apply official patches or updates from IBM as soon as they become available for affected WebSphere Liberty versions. 2. Implement network-level protections such as Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) or Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) to detect and block anomalous or malformed requests that could trigger excessive memory consumption. 3. Configure rate limiting and throttling on incoming requests to prevent resource exhaustion from high request volumes or malicious payloads. 4. Monitor server memory usage and application performance metrics closely to detect early signs of resource exhaustion or abnormal behavior. 5. Consider deploying WebSphere Liberty instances behind load balancers that can isolate and mitigate the impact of DoS attempts. 6. Conduct regular security assessments and penetration testing to identify and address resource allocation weaknesses. 7. Review and harden application-level input validation to reduce the risk of malformed requests causing resource spikes. 8. Maintain an incident response plan specifically addressing denial of service scenarios to ensure rapid recovery.