CVE-2024-28995 — SERV-U
HIGHCVE-2024-28995 is a high-severity (CVSS 8.6) Path Traversal vulnerability in solarwinds serv-u. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2024-07-17) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.
SolarWinds Serv-U was susceptible to a directory transversal vulnerability that would allow access to read sensitive files on the host machine.
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2024-07-17. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2024-08-07.
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA (KEV catalog and SSVC triage) for CVE-2024-28995.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2024-28995 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). In the shaded patch-first corner (EPSS 50%+, CVSS 7.0+).
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 395,249 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the ≥ 90% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
SolarWinds Serv-U was susceptible to a directory transversal vulnerability that would allow access to read sensitive files on the host machine.
Affected Products
serv-usolarwindsResearch use only. For defensive security, authorized penetration testing, and academic research only. Never execute exploit code against systems without explicit written authorization.
SolarWinds Serv-U 15.4.2 HF1 - Directory Traversal
by İbrahimsql · May 29, 2025
Detection & mitigation playbook
Vendor / applianceDetect
Inventory every solarwinds serv-u deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.
Remediation status
No patch has shipped for CVE-2024-28995 yet — track the solarwinds serv-u advisory for a fixed release and apply the workarounds below in the meantime.
Mitigate without a patch
Resolve every user-supplied path to its canonical form and reject anything that escapes the intended directory, and run the component under an account that has no read or write access outside the directory it legitimately serves. Alongside that, restrict the management interface to trusted networks and apply the vendor's recommended configuration mitigations.
How to detect CVE-2024-28995
A community-maintained Nuclei template exists for this CVE. You can scan for it directly:
nuclei -id cve-2024-28995 -u https://target- Template
- SolarWinds Serv-U - Directory Traversal
- Severity
- high
- Impact
- Attackers can traverse directories and access sensitive files outside the intended directory structure.
- Remediation
- Update SolarWinds Serv-U to a version that patches the directory traversal vulnerability.
Template by ProjectDiscovery nuclei-templates (DhiyaneshDK), MIT licensed. View the full template. Scan only systems you are authorised to test.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2024-28995 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.