CVE-2025-40538 Details
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.
View at NVD
Exploit prediction scoring system (EPSS) score for CVE-2025-40538
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System): EPSS predicts the likelihood that a vulnerability will be exploited in the wild. A higher percentage means a greater chance of an exploit occurring. The EPSS model produces a probability score between 0 and 1 (0 and 100%).
0.5 Probability of exploitation activity being observed over the next 30 days (39th percentile)
CVSS score for CVE-2025-40538
CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System): An open framework owned and managed by FIRST.Org, Inc. that assigns a numerical score from 0 to 10 to software vulnerabilities to indicate their severity.
9.1 Critical
DVE Score by Bitsight AI
DVE scores complement traditional static scoring systems like CVSS with Bitsight AI powered real-time threat intelligence and underground cyber criminal activity so that security teams can reduce alert fatigue and focus on vulnerabilities most likely to be exploited.
Low
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CVE-2025-40538 Global Footprint

Top 10 Identified Countries

Country Observations Percentage
CN 1,949 38.89%
US 1,086 21.67%
RU 196 3.91%
CA 161 3.21%
DE 146 2.91%
HK 126 2.51%
FR 108 2.16%
TW 93 1.86%
KR 90 1.80%
IT 66 1.32%

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CVE-2025-40538 Industry Footprint

Top 10 Identified Industries

*Service provider organizations (typically Technology and Telecommunications) are disproportionally represented in the results given their upstream ownership of end-user infrastructure. See our FAQs.

Industry* Observations Percentage
Technology 1,941 61.60%
Telecommunications 713 22.63%
Business Services 65 2.06%
Manufacturing 54 1.71%
Retail 47 1.49%
Healthcare/Wellness 43 1.36%
Government/Politics 41 1.30%
Finance 41 1.30%
Media/Entertainment 39 1.24%
Transportation 30 0.95%

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