I look at CISA’s (the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list regularly. Usually, it’s the typical flaws, VPN’s, firewalls, Microsoft, some major open-source packages… but today, I noticed CVE-2025-31125, a vulnerability in Vite.
Vite is a frontend tooling framework for JavaScript. If you aren’t a developer, you may have never heard of Vite. It’s an incredibly fast and easy to use library. If you are a CISO, you may think a CVE in a library you’ve never heard of isn’t a problem… but you might be wrong.
For the past 24 months, I’ve been playing with vibe coding – prototypes, proof of concepts, and wild experiments that make co-workers look at me funny. In fact, that is the reason the Vite CVE caught my eye. I have heard of Vite; in fact, I have seen Vite in action quite often.
Vite is the default choice for almost every agentic developer tool out there. If you ask Cursor, Windsurf, Cline, or Co-Pilot to build a dashboard, it doesn’t pick Webpack or next.js; it picks Vite. It doesn’t pick it because it has the best enterprise reviews or the strongest security controls. It picks Vite because it’s fast, it works instantly, and it is incredibly easy to use.
The vulnerability CISA flagged isn’t a bug in the code itself. It’s a configuration issue. The flaw (CVE-2025-31125) triggers when the Vite development server is exposed to the network.
Guess what almost every vibe coder does when helping build and test code? It exposes the server to the network. It has to, it’s how that cool “preview” button works. The AI fires up the app, binds it to the network interfaces (usually all of them aka 0.0.0.0), and then hands the developer a URL to show off that awesome dashboard.
In the process of helpfully assisting developers (or non-developers) who are using vibe-coding to automate and innovate, the AI has done three things:
- Selected the tech stack
- Configured network access
- Opened a security hole
In a software company like Protegrity, all developer code goes through QA and audit; it’s carefully scanned for vulnerabilities, OWASP’s Top 10, and any known CVE’s. We have pipelines that automate the processes between our developers and our security team. We must follow a Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) process.
But what about Bob in accounting, who vibe-coded a quick dashboard to make his life easier? What about Alice in HR who vibe-coded a resume sorter with a nice UI? They didn’t follow your organization’s SDLC. They didn’t check on the latest CVE’s. They probably don’t even know what those acronyms mean.
Shadow IT used to refer to the SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS providers. All those big corporations like AWS that you trusted with a contract and a “shared responsibility model”. We’re way past that now. Your own employees are attempting to be helpful, resourceful, and cutting edge. They are telling a robot to build an app that will help them do their jobs and help your company be successful. The robot is doing exactly what it’s trained to do. The user asked for an app or dashboard, and the robot delivered. It was fast, simple, and frictionless. The AI didn’t know it needed to be secure; it didn’t even know to check current CVE’s.
Welcome to 2026, where everyone in the company may now be a junior developer. They have great ideas, and ever-so slick interfaces. They have a sense of pride and accomplishment because they brought an idea to reality, and it has tangible benefits.
There is an active debate in many organizations I interact with. Do we give our people the tools and let them innovate the future, or do we lock everything down and block every AI tool, LLM service, and Agentic assistant?
CISA says that federal organizations must have the Vite patch implemented by the middle of February. That patch, though, isn’t the fix. The fix is recognition that vibe coding is everywhere. Everyone is dabbling in it. Your employees who want to do more, make a splash, and achieve beyond their goals are looking at vibe coding as a major advantageous tool.
We have blown past Shadow IT and are witnessing the birth of the Shadow Developer. These aren’t malicious employees, they’re just looking to be efficient. They are solving business problems at speeds we would have thought impossible just a couple of years ago. They are using tools that automate the areas they aren’t experts in (coding, selecting libraries) so they can focus on the job you hired them for. So, the answer can’t be “take the toys away”. The toys are everywhere, and if we block them, Alice and Bob will use their personal devices. Leaving the “some visibility” we have if they are on our systems and network, for “no visibility” of whatever the heck they are doing at home.
We need to build environments where the AI is fast and frictionless, with secure defaults, and with curated system prompts that define the stack. We can’t turn Alice and Bob into security engineers, but we can stop the Agentic Coding platforms from acting like reckless interns.
Ultimately, this isn’t about a CVE in a JavaScript library. This is your reminder that the barrier to entry for software development has collapsed. Anyone who can frame their intent in a well-worded prompt can make magic happen. But, as Rumpelstiltskin in “Once Upon a Time” always says, “Magic always comes with a price”.
Our job is to make sure that price isn’t our data, our network, or our reputation.