Trustwave ModSecurity 3.x through 3.0.4 allows denial of service via a special request. NOTE: The discoverer reports "Trustwave has signaled they are disputing our claims." The CVE suggests that there is a security issue with how ModSecurity handles regular expressions that can result in a Denial of Service condition. The vendor does not consider this as a security issue because1) there is no default configuration issue here. An attacker would need to know that a rule using a potentially problematic regular expression was in place, 2) the attacker would need to know the basic nature of the regular expression itself to exploit any resource issues. It's well known that regular expression usage can be taxing on system resources regardless of the use case. It is up to the administrator to decide on when it is appropriate to trade resources for potential security benefit
Conclusion & alert: CVE-2020-15598 is rated High Exploit Risk (75.3/100): CVSS High severity, with medium exploitation likelihood (EPSS 3.79%). Core evidence: 1 public exploit reference(s) are indexed (Exploit-DB). Mandatory action: Public exploits are available—assess exposure, apply mitigations, and prioritize patching.
Risk is dynamic; we continuously reassess and refresh what is shown on this page as upstream context changes.
| EDB-ID | Source | Kind | Published | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | nvd_ref | exploit_tag | Exploit-DB ↗ |
EPSS lead: Daily EPSS estimates relative likelihood of exploitation; percentile ranks this CVE among scored vulnerabilities (higher = more severe relative rank).
| # | Date | Old EPSS score | New EPSS score | Delta (New - Old) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2025-11-21 | 4.10% | 3.79% | -0.32% |
| 2 | 2025-11-18 | 3.79% | 4.10% | +0.32% |
| 3 | 2025-08-24 | — | 3.79% | — |
Full EPSS history (16 records total)
CVSS metrics for this CVE.
| Base score | Version | Severity | Vector | Exploitability | Impact | Score source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7.5 | 3.1 | HIGH |
|
3.9 | 3.6 | [email protected] |
| 5.0 | 2.0 | MEDIUM |
|
10.0 | 2.9 | [email protected] |
| vendor | priority | summary | link |
|---|---|---|---|
debian
|
not yet assigned | CVE-2020-15598 not yet assigned priority: Debian including 1 source packages (modsecurity), 5 status rows across 5 suites (bookworm, bullseye, forky, sid, trixie): resolved 5. | https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2020-15598 |
ubuntu
|
medium | CVE-2020-15598 medium priority: Ubuntu including 2 source packages (modsecurity, modsecurity-apache), 26 status rows across 13 suites (bionic, focal, groovy, hirsute, impish, jammy, kinetic, lunar, mantic, noble, trusty, upstream, xenial): not-affected 21, DNE 3, ignored 1, released 1. | https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2020-15598 |
| Vendor | Product | Version | Raw CPE |
|---|---|---|---|
| owasp | modsecurity | >= 3.0.0, <= 3.0.4 | cpe:2.3:a:owasp:modsecurity:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:* |
| debian | debian_linux | 10.0 | cpe:2.3:o:debian:debian_linux:10.0:*:*:*:*:*:*:* |
| URL | Tags |
|---|---|
| http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/159185/ModSecurity-3.0.x-Denial-Of-Service.html | Third Party Advisory VDB Entry |
| http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2020/Sep/32 | Mailing List Third Party Advisory |
| https://coreruleset.org/20200914/cve-2020-15598/ | Exploit Patch Third Party Advisory |
| https://www.debian.org/security/2020/dsa-4765 | Third Party Advisory |
| https://www.modsecurity.org | Product Vendor Advisory |