CVE-2018-25049 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-1333 vulnerability in email-existence. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.
email-existence Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity vulnerability
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2018-25049.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2018-25049 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 377,166 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
How broadly this vulnerability is actually deployed: weekly install volume shows current usage, and reverse-dependency count shows how many other packages break if it stays unpatched.
email-existencenpmDescription
A vulnerability was found in email-existence. It has been rated as problematic. Affected by this issue is some unknown functionality of the file index.js. The manipulation leads to inefficient regular expression complexity. The name of the patch is 0029ba71b6ad0d8ec0baa2ecc6256d038bdd9b56. It is recommended to apply a patch to fix this issue. VDB-216854 is the identifier assigned to this vulnerability.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | email-existence | all versions | No fix |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for email-existence, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Remediation status
No patched version of email-existence has shipped for CVE-2018-25049 yet. Where your build allows, override or pin the dependency away from the vulnerable range, and apply any maintainer-recommended mitigation.
Mitigate without a patch
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2018-25049 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2018-25049. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2018-25049 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2018-25049 across npm dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.