Serv-U ACL Bypass Privilege Escalation to System Admin
CVE-2025-40538 Published on February 24, 2026
SolarWinds Serv-U Broken Access Control Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
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.
Vulnerability Analysis
CVE-2025-40538 is exploitable with network access, and requires user privileges. This vulnerability is considered to have a low attack complexity. The potential impact of an exploit of this vulnerability is considered to be critical as this vulnerability has a high impact to the confidentiality, integrity and availability of this component.
Weakness Type
Improper Privilege Management
The software does not properly assign, modify, track, or check privileges for an actor, creating an unintended sphere of control for that actor.
Products Associated with CVE-2025-40538
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Affected Versions
SolarWinds Serv-U Version SolarWinds Serv-U 15.5.3 and prior versions is affected by CVE-2025-40538Exploit Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) scores estimate the probability that a vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the next 30 days. The percentile shows you how this score compares to all other vulnerabilities.