CVE-2025-43940 is an OS Command Injection vulnerability identified in Dell Unity storage systems version 5.5 and earlier. The root cause is improper neutralization of special elements in OS commands (CWE-78), which allows an attacker with low privileges and local access to inject and execute arbitrary commands on the underlying operating system. This can lead to unauthorized command execution and elevation of privileges, compromising the system's confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The vulnerability does not require user interaction, increasing its risk once local access is obtained. The CVSS 3.1 base score is 7.8, indicating high severity due to high impact on confidentiality, integrity, and availability, combined with low attack complexity and low privileges required. Although no public exploits are known yet, the potential for exploitation is significant, especially in environments where local access controls are weak. Dell Unity is widely used in enterprise storage solutions, making this vulnerability critical for organizations relying on these systems for data storage and management. The lack of available patches at the time of publication necessitates immediate mitigation through access restrictions and monitoring until official fixes are released.

For European organizations, this vulnerability could lead to severe consequences including unauthorized access to sensitive data, disruption of storage services, and potential lateral movement within networks. Compromise of Dell Unity storage arrays could result in data breaches affecting confidentiality, data corruption or deletion impacting integrity, and denial of storage services affecting availability. Enterprises in sectors such as finance, healthcare, telecommunications, and government that rely heavily on Dell Unity for critical data storage are particularly at risk. The ability for a low-privileged local attacker to escalate privileges increases the threat of insider attacks or attacks leveraging compromised local accounts. Given the critical role of storage infrastructure, exploitation could disrupt business operations and cause regulatory compliance issues under GDPR and other data protection laws. The absence of known exploits currently provides a window for proactive defense, but organizations must act swiftly to mitigate risk.

1. Immediately restrict local access to Dell Unity systems to trusted and authorized personnel only, using strong authentication and physical security controls. 2. Implement strict monitoring and logging of command execution and user activities on Dell Unity systems to detect anomalous behavior indicative of exploitation attempts. 3. Employ network segmentation to isolate storage management interfaces from general user networks, minimizing exposure. 4. Prepare for patch deployment by closely monitoring Dell’s advisories and applying security updates as soon as they become available. 5. Conduct regular security audits and vulnerability assessments focusing on local access controls and privilege management on storage systems. 6. Consider deploying host-based intrusion detection systems (HIDS) on management servers to detect suspicious command injection patterns. 7. Educate system administrators and operators about the risks of local access exploitation and enforce the principle of least privilege. 8. If possible, use application whitelisting or command filtering to prevent execution of unauthorized OS commands within the Dell Unity environment.