CVE-2025-33090
📋 TL;DR
CVE-2025-33090 is a denial-of-service vulnerability in IBM Concert Software where a remote attacker can send specially crafted regular expressions that cause excessive resource consumption, potentially crashing the service. This affects all users running IBM Concert Software versions 1.0.0 through 1.1.0. The vulnerability requires network access to the application but no authentication.
💻 Affected Systems
- IBM Concert Software
📦 What is this software?
⚠️ Risk & Real-World Impact
Worst Case
Complete service outage of IBM Concert Software, disrupting business operations that depend on this application.
Likely Case
Temporary service degradation or crashes requiring manual restart of the application.
If Mitigated
Minimal impact if regular expression processing is limited or the application is behind rate limiting/WAF.
🎯 Exploit Status
Exploitation requires knowledge of endpoints that accept regular expression input. No authentication is required.
🛠️ Fix & Mitigation
✅ Official Fix
Patch Version: IBM Concert Software 1.1.1 or later
Vendor Advisory: https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/7242354
Restart Required: Yes
Instructions:
1. Download IBM Concert Software version 1.1.1 or later from IBM Fix Central. 2. Stop the IBM Concert service. 3. Apply the update following IBM's installation guide. 4. Restart the service. 5. Verify the update was successful.
🔧 Temporary Workarounds
Network Segmentation
allRestrict network access to IBM Concert Software to only trusted sources using firewall rules.
Web Application Firewall
allDeploy a WAF with regex attack protection to block malicious regular expressions before they reach the application.
🧯 If You Can't Patch
- Implement strict network access controls to limit which IP addresses can reach the IBM Concert service.
- Deploy rate limiting on the application or network level to prevent repeated exploitation attempts.
🔍 How to Verify
Check if Vulnerable:
Check the IBM Concert Software version via the administrative interface or configuration files. If version is between 1.0.0 and 1.1.0 inclusive, the system is vulnerable.Check Version:
Check the application's admin console or review installation logs for version information.Verify Fix Applied:
Verify the installed version is 1.1.1 or later and test regular expression functionality to ensure normal operation.📡 Detection & Monitoring
Log Indicators:
- Unusually high CPU/memory usage spikes
- Application crash logs
- Repeated failed requests with regex patterns
Network Indicators:
- High volume of requests containing complex regular expressions to IBM Concert endpoints
SIEM Query:
source="ibm_concert" AND (cpu_usage>90 OR memory_usage>90) OR message="crash" OR request_uri="*regex*"