What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-40538: SolarWinds Serv-U Broken Access Control Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.2 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-02-24 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-269

Description

A broken access control vulnerability exists in Serv-U which when exploited, gives a malicious actor the ability to create a system admin user and execute arbitrary code as a privileged account via domain admin or group admin privileges. This issue requires administrative privileges to abuse. On Windows deployments, the risk is scored as a medium because services frequently run under less-privileged service accounts by default.

Affected products

• SolarWinds Serv-U: before 15.5.4 — fixed in 15.5.4

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: SolarWinds Serv-U 15.5.4. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://documentation.solarwinds.com/en/success_center/servu/content/release_notes/servu_15-5-4_release_notes.htm
• https://www.solarwinds.com/trust-center/security-advisories/CVE-2025-40538

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