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Weakness · ClassCWE-400

CWE-400: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

Likelihood of exploit: HighKEV-linkedClass

As of 2026-10-05, CWE-400 (Uncontrolled Resource Consumption) underlies 50 CVEs tracked by Threadlinqs, 3 of them in the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, and is cited by 43 tracked threats. MITRE rates its likelihood of exploit as High.

CVEs
50Mapped to CWE-400
CISA KEV
3Exploited in the wild
Critical
2CVSS v3 critical CVEs
Threats
43Tracked campaigns citing it
Likelihood
HighMITRE likelihood of exploit

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What is CWE-400?

The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.

CWE-400 is a class-level weakness in MITRE’s Common Weakness Enumeration, with a MITRE likelihood of exploit of High. Applicable platforms: Language: Not Language-Specific; Technology: Not Technology-Specific.

Source: MITRE CWE (CWE-400 definition, reproduced verbatim). Counts and linkage below are Threadlinqs data.

Consequences

  • Availability — DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart, DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU), DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory), DoS: Resource Consumption (Other). If an attacker can trigger the allocation of the limited resources, but the number or size of the resources is not controlled, then the most common result is denial of service. This would prevent valid users from accessing the product, and it could potentially have an impact on the surrounding environment, i.e., the product may slow down, crash due to unhandled errors, or lock out legitimate users. For example, a memory exhaustion attack against an application could slow down the application as…
  • Access Control, Other — Bypass Protection Mechanism, Other. In some cases it may be possible to force the product to "fail open" in the event of resource exhaustion. The state of the product -- and possibly the security functionality - may then be compromised.

Source: MITRE CWE, common consequences.

How CWE-400 is exploited in the wild

Threadlinqs maps 50 CVEs to CWE-400, published between 2021-12-10 and 2026-10-01. 3 are listed in CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, the authoritative record of exploitation in the wild, and 2 are tied to ransomware campaigns. By CVSS v3 severity the set splits into 2 critical, 21 high, 18 medium, 3 low. The highest EPSS score in the set is 99.9% (CVE-2023-44487), the modelled probability of exploitation in the next 30 days. 43 tracked threats reference CWE-400 directly or through a CVE it covers; the most recent is “Kiteworks 9.5.1 Patches 126 Vulnerabilities Including Critical Account Takeover in Core and Email Protection Gateway (CVE-2026-102147, CVE-2026-102149)” (2026-10-02). Affected products concentrate in Elastic (10), Gerrit (2), IBM (2), among 39 vendors in total.

Vulnerabilities (CVEs)

Showing 40 of 50 CVEs mapped to CWE-400, CISA KEV first, then by CVSS score.

Affected vendors

Threat activity

43 tracked threats cite CWE-400; the 25 most recent are listed.

Mitigations

  • Architecture and Design: Design throttling mechanisms into the system architecture. The best protection is to limit the amount of resources that an unauthorized user can cause to be expended. A strong authentication and access control model will help prevent such attacks from occurring in the first place. The login application should be protected against DoS attacks as much as possible. Limiting the database access, perhaps by caching result sets, can help minimize the resources expended. To further limit the potential for a DoS attack, consider tracking the rate of requests received from users and blocking requests that exceed a defined rate threshold.
  • Architecture and Design: Mitigation of resource exhaustion attacks requires that the target system either: recognizes the attack and denies that user further access for a given amount of time, or uniformly throttles all requests in order to make it more difficult to consume resources more quickly than they can again be freed. The first of these solutions is an issue in itself though, since it may allow attackers to prevent the use of the system by a particular valid user. If the attacker impersonates the valid user, they may be able to prevent the user from accessing the server in question. The second solution is simply difficult to effectively institute -- and even when properly done, it does not provide a full…
  • Architecture and Design: Ensure that protocols have specific limits of scale placed on them.
  • Implementation: Ensure that all failures in resource allocation place the system into a safe posture.

Source: MITRE CWE, potential mitigations.

Detection methods (MITRE CWE)

  • Automated Static Analysis (effectiveness: Limited): Automated static analysis typically has limited utility in recognizing resource exhaustion problems, except for program-independent system resources such as files, sockets, and processes. For system resources, automated static analysis may be able to detect circumstances in which resources are not released after they have expired. Automated analysis of configuration files may be able to detect settings that do not specify a maximum value. Automated static analysis tools will not be appropriate…
  • Automated Dynamic Analysis (effectiveness: Moderate): Certain automated dynamic analysis techniques may be effective in spotting resource exhaustion problems, especially with resources such as processes, memory, and connections. The technique may involve generating a large number of requests to the product within a short time frame.
  • Fuzzing (effectiveness: Opportunistic): While fuzzing is typically geared toward finding low-level implementation bugs, it can inadvertently find resource exhaustion problems. This can occur when the fuzzer generates a large number of test cases but does not restart the targeted product in between test cases. If an individual test case produces a crash, but it does not do so reliably, then an inability to handle resource exhaustion may be the cause.

Source: MITRE CWE, detection methods. Threadlinqs detection rules for the threats above are Blue tier and higher.