Over 500 Apache Tika Instances Exposed Online to Critical XXE Attacks

A critical XML External Entity (XXE) injection vulnerability in Apache Tika has exposed over 500 public-facing servers worldwide to potential exploitation.

CVE-2025-66516, carrying the maximum CVSS severity score of 10.0, represents a significant threat to organizations deploying vulnerable versions of the widely used document processing framework.

CVE-ID	CVSS Score	Vulnerability Type	Affected Versions	Severity
CVE-2025-66516	10.0	XXE Injection	tika-core 1.13.0–3.2.1	Critical

Critical Flaw Enables Multiple Attack Vectors

The vulnerability lies in Apache Tika’s improper handling of XFA files embedded in PDF documents, creating a direct path for XXE injection attacks.

Threat actors exploiting this weakness can accomplish multiple objectives: extracting sensitive data from affected systems, exhausting server resources through denial-of-service attacks, or executing Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) operations to compromise internal infrastructure.

The affected versions span nearly a decade, from tika-core 1.13.0 in 2016 through 3.2.1, highlighting the longevity of this vulnerability across multiple major and minor releases.

Apache Tika serves as a content detection and extraction framework, making it a critical component in enterprise environments that handle document processing and metadata extraction workflows.

Security research firm Censys identified 565 potentially vulnerable Apache Tika Server instances exposed publicly across multiple countries and organizations at the time of disclosure on December 4, 2025.

This exposure level transforms an already critical vulnerability into an immediately exploitable condition, as threat actors require only internet connectivity to target vulnerable instances, eliminating the need to compromise internal networks.

Currently, no publicly available proof-of-concept exploit code has emerged, and active exploitation has not been observed in the wild.

However, the maximum severity rating, combined with the straightforward attack methodology, suggests that functional exploits may surface rapidly once technical exploitation details gain wider circulation among threat actors.

Apache Software Foundation released patches addressing this vulnerability through official channels. Organizations must immediately upgrade tika-core to version 3.2.2 or later.

For applications utilizing Apache Tika as a Maven dependency, remediation requires additional complexity: upgrading tika-parsers to version 1.28.6 or later and tika-pdf-module to version 3.2.2 or later.

Detection of vulnerable instances remains substantially constrained. Censys can only reliably identify exposed Tika Server deployments, leaving embedded Tika library implementations invisible to public scanning.

This detection gap likely means the actual exposure significantly exceeds the 565 publicly identified instances, as countless organizations embed Tika as an internal dependency without exposing management interfaces publicly.

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