SolarWinds Serv-U Broken Access Control Remote Code Execution Vulnerability 

(CVE-2025-40538)

Summary

A broken access control vulnerability exists in Serv-U which when exploited together, 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 15.5

Fixed Software Release

SolarWinds Serv-U 15.5.4

Advisory Detail

Severity

9.1 Critical

Advisory ID

First Published

02/24/2026

Last Published

02/24/2026