Merry Christmas to everybody, except that dude who works for Elastic, who decided to drop an unauthenticated exploit for MongoDB on Christmas Day, that leaks memory and automates harvesting secrets (e.g. database passwords)

CVE-2025-14847 aka MongoBleed

Exp: https://github.com/joe-desimone/mongobleed/blob/main/mongobleed.py

This one is incredibly widely internet facing and will very likely see mass exploitation and impactful incidents

Impacts every MongoDB version going back a decade.

Shodan dork: product:"MongoDB"

The exploit is real and works, you can just run it and target specific offsets and/or keep running it until you get AWS secrets and such.
Merry Christmas Day! Have a MongoDB security incident.

Somebody from Elastic Security decided to post an exploit for CVE-2025–14847 on Christmas Day.

Medium
There’s a great blog on detecting MongoBleed exploitation via Velociraptor https://blog.ecapuano.com/p/hunting-mongobleed-cve-2025-14847
Hunting MongoBleed (CVE-2025-14847)

Detecting CVE-2025-14847 Exploitation with Velociraptor

Eric’s Substack
I set up a honeypot for MongoBleed on a legit MongoDB instance, yolo and all that.
Just checked in on my MongoDB honeypot, it's had a few hundred MongoBleed attempts from 7 IPs so far.
One of the IPs in the honeypot is a ransomware/extortion group, they are blasting the internet. I have a capture of the traffic, it's an exact match to the mongobleed.py exploit by joe (it doesn't match a normal connect as it's invalidly formatted session).

So @cyb3rops has made a MongoBleed log detection tool https://github.com/Neo23x0/mongobleed-detector

I’ve tried it and it works on a pwned server.

GitHub - Neo23x0/mongobleed-detector: Detection Script for MongoBleed Exploitation

Detection Script for MongoBleed Exploitation. Contribute to Neo23x0/mongobleed-detector development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

A Christmas lesson:

Cyber people probably shouldn't post full chain exploits which automate stealing secrets on Christmas Day for new vulns in direct competitor products.

I mean, people can post whatever they want.. it would just be nice to have a holiday with family and all, rather than arming teenagers.

MongoBleed’s been added to CISA KEV. https://mastodon.social/@cisakevtracker/115804868181877648

If anybody is wondering on honeypot activity, lots.

More worrying is the real world incidents, two at large orgs I know of so far where attackers have gained access to internal DevOps systems using stolen creds used on MongoDB systems. In both cases it’s Advanced Persistent Teenagers.

MongoDB have a blog out about #MongoBleed

Notably:

- Internal find at MongoDB

- they notified customers of the issue and patch availability on December 23rd

- A security vendor published technical details on December 24th, Christmas Eve

- Somebody at Elastic, a direct competitor, published an exploit with full secret extraction feature on December 25th, Christmas Day

That was an impossible situation for orgs - the security industry poured fire on them and set their own customers on fire.

@GossiTheDog With security vendors like that, who needs enemies? 🙄 
@GossiTheDog and this right here is why I left IT security - security vendors dropping trou and taking a massive steaming shit on their competitors products while screaming LOOK AT ME IM DOING A SECURITY!!!
@GossiTheDog I feel like there's enough data on what happens as soon as a patch drops, from what has happened every previous time, that the consequences of Mongo dropping a patch on the 23rd were pretty easy to predict.
MongoDB Server Security Update, December 2025

The following is an update on the security vulnerability identified in December 2025.

MongoDB

@GossiTheDog

> Somebody at Elastic, a direct competitor, published an exploit with full secret extraction feature on December 25th, Christmas Day

Which means if you're doing business with Elastic, you're doing business with someone who will intentionally and deliberately risk or outright destroy their own customers for completely imagined gains.

But as we have seen, having anything resembling ethics, morals, or a conscience is treated as a 'weakness.'

@GossiTheDog elastic need a kicking tbh

Also which security vendor?

@GossiTheDog I want to hire them. Time for some Robyn Hud exploits.
@GossiTheDog Only 9 attempts observed by my honeypot so far, with one of them giving up after only 5 consecutive connections (another tried 41 times - the maximum so far):