This vulnerability arises from a failure to release memory after its effective lifetime in the Windows DNS service, allowing an attacker to consume memory and eventually cause the DNS service to stop responding to legitimate queries. The impact is a denial of service that affects the availability of DNS services for any client that relies on the compromised server. The weakness is identified as a memory management error.

Microsoft Windows 10 version 1607 and 1809; Microsoft Windows Server 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, 2019, 2022, 2025 (both full and Server Core installations).

The CVSS score of 7.5 points to a high severity. The EPSS score of 1% indicates a low but nonzero exploitation probability, and the vulnerability is not in the CISA KEV catalog, suggesting that widespread exploitation is not documented yet. Based on the description, the attack can be performed from the network by sending crafted packets to the DNS service to trigger the memory leak. An attacker only needs network reachability to the DNS port; no privileged local access is required. The vulnerability likely requires repeated traffic to reach the memory exhaustion threshold, but once triggered the service will become unavailable until it is restarted or patched.