CVE-2025-66516 Details
Critical XXE in Apache Tika tika-core (1.13-3.2.1), tika-pdf-module (2.0.0-3.2.1) and tika-parsers (1.13-1.28.5) modules on all platforms allows an attacker to carry out XML External Entity injection via a crafted XFA file inside of a PDF.

This CVE covers the same vulnerability as in CVE-2025-54988. However, this CVE expands the scope of affected packages in two ways.

First, while the entrypoint for the vulnerability was the tika-parser-pdf-module as reported in CVE-2025-54988, the vulnerability and its fix were in tika-core. Users who upgraded the tika-parser-pdf-module but did not upgrade tika-core to >= 3.2.2 would still be vulnerable.

Second, the original report failed to mention that in the 1.x Tika releases, the PDFParser was in the "org.apache.tika:tika-parsers" module.
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Exploit prediction scoring system (EPSS) score for CVE-2025-66516
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System): EPSS predicts the likelihood that a vulnerability will be exploited in the wild. A higher percentage means a greater chance of an exploit occurring. The EPSS model produces a probability score between 0 and 1 (0 and 100%).
88.98 Probability of exploitation activity being observed over the next 30 days (100th percentile)
CVSS score for CVE-2025-66516
CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System): An open framework owned and managed by FIRST.Org, Inc. that assigns a numerical score from 0 to 10 to software vulnerabilities to indicate their severity.
8.4 High
Products affected by CVE-2025-66516
Tika 1.27
Tika 1.28.2
Tika 1.28.4
Tika 2.7.0
Tika 2.9.1
DVE Score by Bitsight AI
DVE scores complement traditional static scoring systems like CVSS with Bitsight AI powered real-time threat intelligence and underground cyber criminal activity so that security teams can reduce alert fatigue and focus on vulnerabilities most likely to be exploited.
Low
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CVE-2025-66516 Global Footprint

Top 10 Identified Countries

Country Observations Percentage
US 69 23.79%
DE 60 20.69%
CN 34 11.72%
KR 24 8.28%
FR 22 7.59%
HK 19 6.55%
NL 9 3.10%
FI 8 2.76%
GB 7 2.41%
RU 5 1.72%

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CVE-2025-66516 Industry Footprint

Top 10 Identified Industries

*Service provider organizations (typically Technology and Telecommunications) are disproportionally represented in the results given their upstream ownership of end-user infrastructure. See our FAQs.

Industry* Observations Percentage
Technology 206 93.64%
Telecommunications 12 5.45%
Education 1 0.45%
Business Services 1 0.45%

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