Weakness · Medium
CWE-1188: Initialization of a Resource with an Insecure Default
What it is
The product initializes or sets a resource with a default that is intended to be changed by the product's installer, administrator, or maintainer, but the default is not secure.
- Severity (our rating)
- Medium
- Likelihood of exploit
- Not rated by MITRE
- Introduced during
- Implementation, System Configuration
- Exploited in the wild
- 5 known exploited CVEs
What an attacker can do
- Varies by Context (Other)
How to prevent it
MITRE lists no specific mitigation for this weakness. Treat it like its parent weaknesses below: validate input, keep the design simple and review the code where it could appear.
How to find it
- Automated Static Analysis. Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)
Exploited in the wild: 5 CVEs
Vulnerabilities caused by CWE-1188 that attackers have used, from CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, newest first.
- CVE-2025-48927TeleMessage TM SGNL Initialization of a Resource with an Insecure Default Vulnerability · added July 1, 2025
- CVE-2023-27524Apache Superset Insecure Default Initialization of Resource Vulnerability · added January 8, 2024
- CVE-2023-6448Unitronics Vision PLC and HMI Insecure Default Password Vulnerability · added December 11, 2023
- CVE-2022-24706Apache CouchDB Insecure Default Initialization of Resource Vulnerability · added August 25, 2022
- CVE-2020-13927Apache Airflow's Experimental API Authentication Bypass · added January 18, 2022
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Start freeSource: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.