How should we interpret CVSS severity scores?

CVSS estimates technical severity, but it does not automatically equal business risk. Prioritize using context like internet exposure, asset criticality, known exploitation, and whether compensating controls exist. A Medium CVSS on an exposed production system can be more urgent than a Critical on an isolated non-production host.

Vulnerability Database

Q: What is a Vulnerability (CVE) and why does it matter?

A security vulnerability is a weakness in software, hardware, or configuration that can be exploited to compromise confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Many vulnerabilities are tracked as CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), which provide a standardized identifier so teams can coordinate patching, mitigation, and risk assessment across tools and vendors.

Q: What's the difference between a vulnerability, an exploit, and a zero-day?

A vulnerability is the underlying weakness. An exploit is the method or code used to take advantage of it. A zero-day is a vulnerability that is unknown to the vendor or has no publicly available fix when attackers begin using it. Risk increases sharply when exploitation becomes reliable or widespread.

Q: Why do vulnerabilities keep reappearing in our environment?

Recurring findings usually come from incomplete asset discovery, inconsistent patch management, inherited images, and configuration drift. In modern environments, you also need to watch the software supply chain: dependencies, containers, build pipelines, and third-party services can reintroduce the same weakness even after you patch a single host.

Q: How do we prioritize remediation without burning out the team?

Use a repeatable triage model: focus first on externally exposed assets, high-value systems (identity, VPN, email, production), vulnerabilities with known exploits, and issues that enable remote code execution or privilege escalation. Then enforce patch SLAs and track progress so remediation is steady, not reactive.

Q: How can SynScan help reduce vulnerability risk over time?

SynScan combines attack surface monitoring and continuous security auditing to keep your inventory current, flag high-impact vulnerabilities early, and help you turn raw findings into a practical remediation plan.

328,409

Total vulnerabilities in the database

apollo-server-core vulnerable to URL-based XSS attack affecting IE11 on default landing page

Impact

The default landing page contained HTML to display a sample curl command which is made visible if the full landing page bundle could not be fetched from Apollo's CDN. The server's URL is directly interpolated into this command inside the browser from window.location.href. On some older browsers such as IE11, this value is not URI-encoded. On such browsers, opening a malicious URL pointing at an Apollo Router could cause execution of attacker-controlled JavaScript.

This only affects Apollo Server with the default landing page enabled. Old browsers visiting your server may be affected if ANY of these apply:

You do not pass any landing page plugin to the plugins option of new ApolloServer.
You pass ApolloServerPluginLandingPageLocalDefault() or ApolloServerPluginLandingPageProductionDefault() to the plugins option of new ApolloServer.

Browsers visiting your server are NOT affected if ANY of these apply:

You pass ApolloServerPluginLandingPageDisabled() to the plugins option of new ApolloServer.
You pass ApolloServerPluginLandingPageGraphQLPlayground() to the plugins option of new ApolloServer.
You pass a custom plugin implementing the renderLandingPage hook to the plugins option of new ApolloServer.

This issue was introduced in v3.0.0 when the landing page feature was added.

Patches

To avoid this, the sample curl command has been removed in release 3.10.1.

Workarounds

Disabling the landing page removes the possibility of exploit:

import { ApolloServerPluginLandingPageDisabled } from &#039;apollo-server-core&#039;;

new ApolloServer({
  plugins: [ApolloServerPluginLandingPageDisabled()],
  // ...
});

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

Open an issue in the Apollo Server repository
Email us at security@apollographql.com

Credits

This issue was discovered by Adrian Denkiewicz of Doyensec.

Published: Aug 18, 2022
Updated: Apr 14, 2023
GHSA: GHSA-2fvv-qxrq-7jq6
Severity: Medium
Exploit:

No technical information available.

CWEs:

CWE-79

OWASP TOP 10:

A7 - Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)

Affected Software
References

Software	From	Fixed in
apollo-server-core	3.0.0	3.10.1

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Vulnerability (CVE) and why does it matter?

A security vulnerability is a weakness in software, hardware, or configuration that can be exploited to compromise confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Many vulnerabilities are tracked as CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), which provide a standardized identifier so teams can coordinate patching, mitigation, and risk assessment across tools and vendors.

CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) estimates technical severity, but it doesn't automatically equal business risk. Prioritize using context like internet exposure, affected asset criticality, known exploitation (proof-of-concept or in-the-wild), and whether compensating controls exist. A "Medium" CVSS on an exposed, production system can be more urgent than a "Critical" on an isolated, non-production host.

A vulnerability is the underlying weakness. An exploit is the method or code used to take advantage of it. A zero-day is a vulnerability that is unknown to the vendor or has no publicly available fix when attackers begin using it. In practice, risk increases sharply when exploitation becomes reliable or widespread.

Recurring findings usually come from incomplete Asset Discovery, inconsistent patch management, inherited images, and configuration drift. In modern environments, you also need to watch the software supply chain: dependencies, containers, build pipelines, and third-party services can reintroduce the same weakness even after you patch a single host. Unknown or unmanaged assets (often called Shadow IT) are a common reason the same issues resurface.

Use a simple, repeatable triage model: focus first on externally exposed assets, high-value systems (identity, VPN, email, production), vulnerabilities with known exploits, and issues that enable remote code execution or privilege escalation. Then enforce patch SLAs and track progress using consistent metrics so remediation is steady, not reactive.

SynScan combines attack surface monitoring and continuous security auditing to keep your inventory current, flag high-impact vulnerabilities early, and help you turn raw findings into a practical remediation plan.