SolarWinds fixes severe Serv-U vulnerability (CVE-2024-28995)

June 8, 2024

SolarWinds has fixed a high-severity vulnerability (CVE-2024-28995) affecting its Serv-U managed file transfer (MFT) server solution, which could be exploited by unauthenticated attackers to access sensitive files on the host machine.

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About CVE-2024-28995

Serv-U MFT Server is a widely used enterprise solution that provides secure file transfer and file sharing hosted on Windows and Linux machines.

Discovered and reported by Hussein Daher, CVE-2024-28995 is a directory transversal (aka path traversal) vulnerability that affects SolarWinds Serv-U 15.4.2 HF 1 and previous versions.

Directory traversal vulnerabilities allow attackers to access directories and files outside the server’s root directory.

The vulnerability’s CVSS base score indicates that it can be exploited remotely, through a low-complexity attack, and that no user interaction is required to leverage it.

SolarWinds fixed the flaw by releasing Serv-U 15.4.2 Hotfix 2, which is suitable for both Windows and Linux OSes (whether 32-bit or 64-bit), the company says. Admins are advised to update their Serv-U instances as soon as possible.

There is no mention of the bug being actively exploited, but attacker have been known to leverage Serv-U vulnerabilities (including zero-days).

UPDATE (June 14, 2024, 04:50 a.m. ET):

The vulnerability is “trivially exploitable”, according to Rapid7.

They managed to exploit the vulnerability on a Windows Server 2022 system running SolarWinds Serv-U File Server (64-bit) version 15.4.2.126, and on Serv-U File Server (64-bit) version 15.4.2.126 running on Linux, and have verified that Solarwind’s hotfix remediates the flaw.

UPDATE (June 19, 2024, 03:50 a.m. ET):

Ron Bowes, Lead Security Researcher at GreyNoise Labs, has detailed CVE-2024-28995 exploitation attempts against their honeypots.