Axios SSRF Vulnerability: 24 Hour Mitigation with SBOM-HQ™
A recently disclosed Axios vulnerability, CVE-2025-27152, has drawn significant attention across the Node.js and JavaScript ecosystem due to its potential for Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) and credential leakage.
Axios is one of the most widely used HTTP clients in modern web applications, making this issue particularly impactful for organizations running API gateways, internal tooling, microservices, and cloud-native applications.
What Was the Vulnerability?
The issue stemmed from how Axios handled baseURL configurations when combined with attacker-controlled absolute URLs.
In vulnerable versions, an application could define a trusted baseURL:
const client = axios.create({
baseURL: "https://internal-api.company.com"
});
But if untrusted input supplied a full URL, Axios would bypass the trusted base and send the request externally:
client.get("https://malicious-site.com");
This behavior opened the door for SSRF attacks and possible credential exposure.
Why Security Teams Were Concerned
- Access to internal infrastructure
- Requests to cloud metadata services
- Exposure of API tokens or authorization headers
- Abuse of backend systems as outbound proxies
- Where Axios existed in their environments
- Which versions were affected
- Which applications were exposed
- How rapidly remediation could occur
The Importance of Rapid Visibility
One of the biggest challenges during vulnerabilities like this is not patching itself — it’s identifying exposure fast enough.
Organizations with strong software inventory and dependency visibility were able to rapidly:
- detect affected Axios versions,
- prioritize impacted applications,
- coordinate remediation,
- validate fixes across environments.
Fast, Effective Mitigation with SBOM-HQ™
One of Eracent’s largest SBOM-HQ customers is both a major commercial software development firm and a financial institution. The vulnerability could have an enormous impact on their operations, and they mandated that every Axios-related exposure be identified and mitigated within 24 hours. The customer was able to quickly search all affected libraries and components in the SBOM-HQ repository. They were able to match them with every version of the Axios applications that included the affected libraries and components, and then identify every installation of the software. Armed with this information, automated patching was scheduled and launched for each machine that housed the software.
SBOM-HQ dramatically reduced response time by providing immediate visibility and reporting around SBOM data. Time-consuming manual investigation was minimized or even eliminated, and the company met its goal by updating its Axios software and mitigating the situation in under 24 hours.
Organizations should upgrade to fixed Axios versions immediately:
- 1.8.2+
- 0.30.0+
Additional best practices include:
- validating outbound URLs,
- restricting external destinations,
- avoiding direct use of user-controlled URLs,
- implementing egress filtering.
Conclusion
The Axios vulnerability is another reminder that modern application risk often comes from third-party dependencies hidden deep inside the software stack.Security teams that maintain accurate SBOM visibility and dependency intelligence are far better positioned to respond quickly when critical vulnerabilities emerge.
Learn more about Eracent’s solution at SBOM-HQ.com.
– by Terry Divelbliss
Terry Divelbliss is Eracent’s Sr. VP of Marketing & Technical Alliances. He has almost 20 years of experience in the ITAM and SAM industry in product management and customer solution implementation roles, and he is a regular speaker at industry conferences and events.
