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

What is CVE-2025-40538?

CVE-2025-40538 is a critical vulnerability in Solarwinds Serv-U, published on 24 Feb 2026. An attacker needs administrator access to exploit it, with no action from the victim.

Official 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.

Weakness: CWE-269

Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-40538?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Solarwinds Serv-U.

How do I fix CVE-2025-40538?

No fix has been published for CVE-2025-40538 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.

Is CVE-2025-40538 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-40538 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Solarwinds Serv-U

• CVE-2021-35211 SolarWinds Serv-U Remote Code Execution Exploited Critical 9.0
• CVE-2024-28995 SolarWinds Serv-U Path Traversal Vulnerability Exploited High 8.6
• CVE-2026-28318 SolarWinds Serv-U Uncontrolled Resource Consumption Exploited High 7.5
• CVE-2021-35247 SolarWinds Serv-U Improper Input Validation Exploited Medium 4.3
• CVE-2020-35481 Code injection in n/a Critical 9.8

All Solarwinds Serv-U vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as GHSA-x366-cwf7-x9gv.