A Tiny File Format Unleashes a Massive Risk—Here’s Why Enterprises Must Act Now!

A severe Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability has been discovered in Apache Parquet—a widely used open-source data storage format—threatening some of the largest cloud platforms in the world. The flaw, identified as CVE-2025-30065, has earned the highest severity rating and could open the door to devastating attacks, including data breaches, ransomware, and full system takeovers.

The vulnerability affects all versions of Apache Parquet up to 1.15.0. At the heart of the issue lies a weakness in how Parquet parses its schema—specifically, its failure to safely deserialize untrusted input. This loophole can be weaponized by cybercriminals who craft malicious Parquet files designed to execute arbitrary code on any system that imports them.

Apache Parquet is no small player in the data world. It’s the backbone of modern data pipelines, offering a high-performance, columnar storage format that powers massive analytics workloads. From Netflix to LinkedIn, Airbnb to major financial institutions, Parquet is everywhere—particularly in data lakes and ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes. Its tight integration with big data ecosystems such as Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure means this vulnerability has a potentially enormous blast radius.

According to a report by BleepingComputer, this critical flaw was responsibly disclosed by a researcher from Amazon on April 1, 2025, and analyzed further by Endor Labs. While the vulnerability itself is not automatically exploitable, it becomes a serious threat when a system ingests a Parquet file from an untrusted source. If triggered, the impact could include unauthorized access, data manipulation, service disruptions, and even the deployment of ransomware payloads within enterprise infrastructure.

Apache has since rolled out a fix in version 1.15.1, urging users to upgrade immediately. However, for organizations that cannot patch right away, experts recommend the following immediate mitigations:

• Avoid importing Parquet files from unknown or unverified sources.
  
  
• Implement strict file validation and schema verification procedures.
  
  
• Increase system logging and monitoring to detect abnormal file activity.
  
  

The gravity of this vulnerability underscores a larger issue within today’s sprawling data infrastructure: trusting too many components by default. As data pipelines grow increasingly complex and interconnected, the risk of introducing a single compromised file into an otherwise secure system has never been higher.

"This isn’t just a bug—it’s a wake-up call," said a security engineer at Endor Labs. "Parquet is used in some of the most sensitive and high-throughput data systems in the world. If those systems go down or get compromised, it could ripple through industries."

This incident adds to a growing list of software supply chain threats, where attackers exploit hidden dependencies and unmonitored entry points to breach secure networks. It also serves as a reminder that even robust, enterprise-grade tools can contain vulnerabilities that lie dormant—until someone finds a way to exploit them.

As we move further into a data-driven future, keeping our tools up to date and our data sources trusted will no longer be optional. In the case of CVE-2025-30065, a single file could be all it takes to bring down the biggest names in tech.