A critical security flaw, CVE-2025-53967, has been discovered on a popular Managed Cloud Platform (MCP) server. This surprising finding has caused quite a stir among the developer and security professional communities. Imperva was first to find and report this command injection vulnerability in July 2025. It has a CVSS score of 7.5 indicating the high severity of this vulnerability.
The vulnerability stems from a design flaw in the server’s fallback mechanism, which fails to sanitize user input correctly. This vulnerability allows malicious actors to issue arbitrary system commands. This can allow an attacker to achieve complete remote code execution (RCE) on vulnerable systems. Consequently, developers and organizations using this MCP server are at significant risk of exposing sensitive data and having their systems compromised.
Understanding CVE-2025-53967
CVE-2025-53967 works by taking advantage of the unsanitized use of user input when creating shell command strings. This incredible second oversight creates the perfect opportunity for malicious actors to now inject harmful commands undetectable.
Imperva highlighted the mechanics of the vulnerability, stating, “Because the curl command is constructed by directly interpolating URL and header values into a shell command string, a malicious actor could craft a specially designed URL or header value that injects arbitrary shell commands.”
The impact of a successful attack would be remote code execution on the host machine. Yet, this would provide unfettered access and command over personally identifiable information and critical infrastructure systems.
Implications for Developers and Security
The implications of CVE-2025-53967 go beyond an immediate system threat. Topping this is developers’ increasing worries around integrity and security of data. The loss of user trust from being exposed to these attacks alone would be damaging, along with the outage caused to operational continuity.
According to a GitHub advisory, “The server constructs and executes shell commands using unvalidated user input directly within command-line strings. This introduces the possibility of shell metacharacter injection (|, >, &&, etc.).” Successful exploitation can lead to RCE under the privileges of the server process, which can facilitate impactful threats to organizational security.
With advancements in technology transforming today’s world at an incredibly fast pace, Imperva continues to stress the importance of strong security. “As AI-driven development tools continue to evolve and gain adoption, it’s essential that security considerations keep pace with innovation,” they stated.
Broader Context in AI Development
CVE-2025-53967 is not a one-off occurrence, as it impacts several other large language models (LLMs), including DeepSeek and xAI’s Grok. This highlights an alarming trend, that AI technologies are routinely insecure by design.
Google’s decision not to fix an ASCII smuggling attack against its new Gemini AI chatbot. This particular attack can be weaponized to generate inputs that slip through safety filters and produce harmful or toxic responses. FireTail also shared how Google’s decision would put their systems at risk to the same types of vulnerabilities.
The combined might of AI technology and parasitic security risks requires a commitment to vigilance from developers and organizations generating and deploying code. As we have just seen with the discovery of CVE-2025-53967, securing AI-driven applications against new and complex threats is essential.