MongoDB Urges Immediate Patching for High-Severity Vulnerability

Update 12/26/25: The recent article update clarified that the vulnerability has not yet been officially classified as a Remote Code Execution (RCE) exploit.

MongoDB has issued a warning to IT administrators, urging them to promptly apply a critical memory-read vulnerability patch that could potentially be exploited by unauthorized attackers remotely.

The security flaw, identified as CVE-2025-14847, impacts various versions of MongoDB and MongoDB Server, posing a risk of exploitation by unauthenticated malicious actors through low-complexity attacks that do not necessitate user interaction.

“A client-side exploitation of the Server’s zlib implementation can expose uninitialized heap memory without the need for server authentication. We highly recommend upgrading to a patched version without delay,” emphasized MongoDB’s security team in a recent advisory.

“We strongly advise immediate upgrading. If immediate upgrading is not feasible, disabling zlib compression on the MongoDB Server by initiating mongod or mongos with a networkMessageCompressors or net.compression.compressors option that excludes zlib is recommended.”

The vulnerability (CVE-2025-14847) stems from a mishandling of a length parameter inconsistency, which, according to the associated CWE-130 classification, has the potential to enable attackers to execute arbitrary code and potentially seize control of targeted devices in certain instances.

To address this security flaw and thwart possible attacks, administrators are urged to promptly upgrade to MongoDB versions 8.2.3, 8.0.17, 7.0.28, 6.0.27, 5.0.32, or 4.4.30.

The affected MongoDB versions include:

• MongoDB 8.2.0 through 8.2.3
• MongoDB 8.0.0 through 8.0.16
• MongoDB 7.0.0 through 7.0.26
• MongoDB 6.0.0 through 6.0.26
• MongoDB 5.0.0 through 5.0.31
• MongoDB 4.4.0 through 4.4.29
• All MongoDB Server v4.2 versions
• All MongoDB Server v4.0 versions
• All MongoDB Server v3.6 versions

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added a MongoDB mongo-express RCE vulnerability (CVE-2019-10758) to its registry of actively exploited vulnerabilities four years ago, highlighting it as a threat that requires immediate mitigation by federal agencies, as mandated by Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01.

MongoDB, a widely used non-relational database management system (DBMS), deviates from traditional relational databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL by storing data in BSON (Binary JSON) documents instead of tables.

The DBMS is employed by over 62,500 customers globally, including numerous Fortune 500 companies.

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