What started as a path traversal led to XSS, SSRF, and full account compromise.

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In cybersecurity, a single flaw is rarely just a flaw — it’s a gateway. CVE-2025–4123, a high-severity vulnerability in Grafana, proved this by chaining path traversal, XSS, open redirects, SSRF, and account takeover into one devastating exploit.

Here’s how a seemingly minor misconfiguration became a nightmare for DevOps teams worldwide.

Grafana’s staticHandler function, designed to serve static files, had a critical oversight: it didn’t properly sanitize user-supplied paths. Attackers could manipulate URLs to traverse directories, accessing files they shouldn’t:

GET /public/\attacker.com/%3F/../../../.. HTTP/1.1  
Host: vulnerable-grafana.com  

This wasn’t just about reading files — it was the first step in a much larger attack chain.

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