VulnerabilityPublished 20 Oct 2025Updated 21 Oct 2025

CVE-2025-61303: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

Source CVE Database V5

Not known to be exploited · CVSS 9.8 Critical.

Data as of 26 Oct 2026, 13:47 UTC

CVSS 3.1 base score

9.8Critical

How severe the flaw is on the 0–10 CVSS scale.

EPSS: 0.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days – higher than 39% of CVEsExploit Prediction Scoring System: the likelihood attackers will use this flaw soon.

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Attack Vector: Network
Attack Complexity: Low
Privileges Required: None
User Interaction: None
Scope: Unchanged
Confidentiality: High
Integrity: High
Availability: High

Bold values are the worst case: easiest to exploit or largest impact.

Attack Vector: Network: The vulnerable component is bound to the network stack and the set of possible attackers extends beyond the other options listed, up to and including the entire Internet. Such a vulnerability is often termed 'remotely exploitable' and can be thought of as an attack being exploitable at the protocol level one or more network hops away (e.g., across one or more routers).
Attack Complexity: Low: Specialized access conditions or extenuating circumstances do not exist. An attacker can expect repeatable success against the vulnerable component.
Privileges Required: None: The attacker is unauthorized prior to attack, and therefore does not require any access to settings or files to carry out an attack.
User Interaction: None: The vulnerable system can be exploited without any interaction from any user.
Scope: Unchanged: An exploited vulnerability can only affect resources managed by the same security authority. In this case, the vulnerable component and the impacted component are either the same, or both are managed by the same security authority.
Confidentiality: High: There is total loss of confidentiality, resulting in all resources within the impacted component being divulged to the attacker. Alternatively, access to only some restricted information is obtained, but the disclosed information presents a direct, serious impact.
Integrity: High: There is a total loss of integrity, or a complete loss of protection. For example, the attacker is able to modify any/all files protected by the impacted component. Alternatively, only some files can be modified, but malicious modification would present a direct, serious consequence to the impacted component.
Availability: High: There is total loss of availability, resulting in the attacker being able to fully deny access to resources in the impacted component; this loss is either sustained (while the attacker continues to deliver the attack) or persistent (the condition persists even after the attack has completed). Alternatively, the attacker has the ability to deny some availability, but the loss of availability presents a direct, serious consequence to the impacted component (e.g., the attacker cannot disrupt existing connections, but can prevent new connections; the attacker can repeatedly exploit a vulnerability that, in each instance of a successful attack, leaks a only small amount of memory, but after repeated exploitation causes a service to become completely unavailable).

Definitions: FIRST CVSS v3.1 specification.

Exploitation evidence

Disclosed: evidence found.
CVE published 20 Oct 2025
Detectable: no evidence on record.
No public nuclei template indexed
Weaponised: no evidence on record.
No public exploit code indexed in Metasploit or Exploit-DB
Exploited in the wildExploited: no evidence on record.
Not in CISA KEV and no source reports exploitation
Observed by OffSeq MirageSeen by Mirage: no evidence on record.
No attack traffic recorded by OffSeq Mirage sensors

A missing step is not evidence of safety. Sources: cve.org (opens in a new tab), the Metasploit, Exploit-DB and nuclei-templates index as of 26 Oct 2026.

Disclosed: The CVE record is public on cve.org. Its publication is t = 0.
Detectable: A public nuclei template can find exposed instances, for defenders and attackers alike.
Weaponised: Public exploit code exists in Metasploit or Exploit-DB, or CISA SSVC or the CVSS exploit maturity reports a public proof of concept.
Exploited in the wild: CISA KEV lists it, CISA SSVC rates exploitation active, or a source reports attacks.
Observed by OffSeq Mirage: OffSeq Mirage honeypot sensors recorded attack traffic for this CVE, or found exposed hosts without attack traffic.

Moments are spaced evenly, not to scale; a dashed line marks a gap of six months or more. Deltas count from t = 0. Sources that give only a date (CISA KEV, Exploit-DB, or a time of exactly 00:00Z) read “same day” rather than hours. Metasploit modules carry the flaw’s disclosure date, not their release date, and nuclei templates carry no date, so both appear above but not on the timeline.

What to do

AI-suggested

To mitigate CVE-2025-61303, organizations should implement the following specific measures: 1) Apply any patches or updates released by Hatching or sandbox vendors addressing resource exhaustion and process spawning controls. 2) Configure sandbox environments to limit the maximum number of child processes spawned by any single sample, employing throttling or rate limiting. 3) Enhance monitoring of sandbox resource usage to detect and alert on abnormal process creation patterns indicative of evasion attempts. 4) Supplement sandbox analysis with additional detection layers such as static analysis, network traffic inspection, and endpoint monitoring to catch behaviors missed due to sandbox evasion. 5) Regularly review and update sandbox configurations to ensure they can handle high-volume logging without degradation. 6) Conduct internal testing with crafted samples that attempt recursive process spawning to validate sandbox resilience. 7) Maintain a multi-sandbox approach where possible, using diverse analysis platforms to reduce reliance on a single vulnerable system. 8) Train analysts to recognize signs of denial-of-analysis and corroborate findings with other threat intelligence sources. These targeted actions go beyond generic advice by focusing on resource management, detection of evasion techniques, and operational best practices tailored to this vulnerability.

Description

Hatching Triage Sandbox Windows 10 build 2004 (2025-08-14) and Windows 10 LTSC 2021(2025-08-14) contains a vulnerability in its Windows behavioral analysis engine that allows a submitted malware sample to evade detection and cause denial-of-analysis. The vulnerability is triggered when a sample recursively spawns a large number of child processes, generating high log volume and exhausting system resources. As a result, key malicious behavior, including PowerShell execution and reverse shell activity, may not be recorded or reported, misleading analysts and compromising the integrity and availability of sandboxed analysis results.

Impact

For European organizations, this vulnerability poses a significant risk to malware detection and incident response capabilities. Organizations that utilize the Hatching Triage Sandbox or similar Windows 10-based sandbox environments for behavioral analysis may experience incomplete or inaccurate threat intelligence due to undetected malicious behaviors. This can lead to delayed or ineffective responses to advanced persistent threats (APTs) and sophisticated malware campaigns that leverage process spawning to evade detection. The denial-of-analysis condition compromises the availability and integrity of forensic data, potentially allowing attackers to maintain persistence or exfiltrate data unnoticed. Critical sectors such as finance, government, and critical infrastructure in Europe, which rely heavily on sandboxing for threat hunting and malware analysis, could be disproportionately impacted. Additionally, the inability to detect reverse shell activity increases the risk of remote control and lateral movement within networks. While no active exploitation is reported, the vulnerability lowers the barrier for attackers to bypass sandbox defenses, increasing the overall threat landscape for European cybersecurity operations.

CWE-400Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (opens in a new tab)
Class weaknessLikelihood of exploit: High
The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.
MITRE discourages mapping vulnerabilities to this broad entry; the root cause is usually a more specific weakness.
Architecture and Design
Design throttling mechanisms into the system architecture. The best protection is to limit the amount of resources that an unauthorized user can cause to be expended. A strong authentication and access control model will help prevent such attacks from occurring in the first place.
Architecture and Design
Mitigation of resource exhaustion attacks requires that the target system either: recognizes the attack and denies that user further access for a given amount of time, or; uniformly throttles all requests in order to make it more difficult to consume resources more quickly than they can again be freed.
Architecture and Design
Ensure that protocols have specific limits of scale placed on them.
OWASP Cheat Sheets
File Upload (opens in a new tab)
OWASP ASVS 4.0.3
V12.1.1 (opens in a new tab)
Attack patterns
XML Ping of the Death (opens in a new tab)
Regular Expression Exponential Blowup (opens in a new tab)
Sustained Client Engagement (opens in a new tab)
From MITRE CWE, MITRE CAPEC and OWASP (Top 10, OpenCRE).

References

github.com/eGkritsis/CVE-2025-61303 (opens in a new tab)

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Exploitation evidence

What to do

Description

AI analysisMachine-generated, updated 20 Oct 2025, 21:08 UTC

WeaknessesCWE-400

Technical details

References

Community reviews

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