CISA Warns of Critical Vulnerability in Adobe Experience Manager Forms

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued a warning concerning a newly discovered vulnerability in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Forms. 

This vulnerability poses a significant risk to organizations using the Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) version of the software. 

Given its severity, CISA has directed all federal agencies to apply patches or discontinue the use of vulnerable systems by November 05, 2025.

Vulnerability explained

Adobe disclosed the flaw (CVE-2025-54253) in early October 2025, marking it as a critical arbitrary code execution vulnerability. 

The flaw allows attackers to execute arbitrary code without requiring authentication or user interaction.  

AEM Forms, a platform widely used by enterprises to manage digital forms and automate document workflows, plays a vital role in customer-facing and back-office operations. 

As a result, successful exploitation could lead to data theft, ransomware deployment, or other widespread network compromise.

Adobe’s response  

Adobe responded by releasing patches for affected versions, including AEM Forms 6.5.13 and earlier. 

The company’s update addresses both CVE-2025-54253 and CVE-2025-54254, another critical vulnerability involving arbitrary file system reads. 

Although publicly available proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits exist for both vulnerabilities, Adobe has reported no evidence of active exploitation in the wild as of mid-October 2025.

In its advisory, Adobe encouraged administrators to apply the security updates immediately and confirm that all systems have been remediated. 

Following Adobe’s disclosure, CISA added CVE-2025-54253 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) Catalog. 

Given the prevalence of AEM Forms across industries such as government, finance, healthcare, and manufacturing, the vulnerability presents a broad and attractive target for cybercriminals and advanced persistent threat (APT) actors alike.

Recommended mitigations

The discovery of this vulnerability underscores the importance of having layered defense strategies in enterprise cybersecurity. These are some of the basic steps organizations can do:

• Apply patches: Keep all AEM Forms systems current and maintain a consistent patch management process.
• Authentication and access control: Use MFA for privileged accounts, enforce least-privilege access, and remove unused credentials.
• Segment networks: Separate critical assets from public systems with firewalls, VLANs, and zero-trust controls.
• Continuously monitor: Conduct regular vulnerability scans and use intrusion detection to spot threats early.
• Audit configurations: Review AEM setups and integrations to ensure compliance with Adobe and CISA security guidance.
• Maintain backups and incident response (IR) plans: Keep encrypted offline backups and tabletop IR plans.

By prioritizing timely patching, strong authentication, network segmentation, and continuous monitoring, organizations can enhance cyber resilience against this and future vulnerabilities.