CVE-2025-55141 is a high-severity vulnerability classified under CWE-862 (Missing Authorization) affecting multiple Ivanti products, including Ivanti Connect Secure, Ivanti Policy Secure, Ivanti ZTA Gateway, and Ivanti Neurons for Secure Access. The flaw exists in versions prior to 22.7R2.9 or 22.8R2 for Connect Secure, 22.7R1.6 for Policy Secure, 2.8R2.3-723 for ZTA Gateway, and 22.8R1.4 for Neurons for Secure Access. This vulnerability allows a remote attacker who has authenticated with read-only administrative privileges to bypass authorization controls and modify authentication-related settings. The vulnerability does not require user interaction and can be exploited over the network (AV:N), with low attack complexity (AC:L), but requires privileges (PR:L) at the read-only admin level. The CVSS v3.1 base score is 8.8, indicating a high impact on confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Exploitation could lead to unauthorized changes in authentication configurations, potentially enabling privilege escalation, unauthorized access, or disruption of secure access mechanisms. Although no known exploits are currently reported in the wild, the vulnerability's nature and impact suggest that exploitation could have severe consequences if weaponized. The fix was deployed on August 2, 2025, but systems not updated remain vulnerable. The vulnerability affects critical secure access infrastructure components widely used in enterprise environments for remote access and zero-trust network access, making it a significant security concern.

For European organizations, this vulnerability poses a substantial risk due to the widespread use of Ivanti's secure access products in enterprise and government sectors. Successful exploitation could compromise the integrity of authentication mechanisms, allowing attackers to alter access controls, potentially leading to unauthorized data access, lateral movement within networks, and disruption of secure remote access services. This could impact confidentiality by exposing sensitive data, integrity by allowing unauthorized configuration changes, and availability by disrupting access services. Critical infrastructure, financial institutions, healthcare providers, and public sector organizations in Europe that rely on Ivanti products for secure remote access are particularly at risk. The breach of authentication settings could also undermine compliance with GDPR and other regulatory frameworks, leading to legal and reputational consequences. Given the remote exploitation vector and the requirement of only read-only admin privileges, insider threats or compromised low-level admin accounts could be leveraged by attackers to escalate privileges and cause significant damage.

Organizations should immediately verify the versions of Ivanti Connect Secure, Policy Secure, ZTA Gateway, and Neurons for Secure Access deployed in their environments and apply the vendor-provided patches released on August 2, 2025. Beyond patching, it is critical to audit and restrict read-only admin privileges to the minimum necessary personnel, implement strong multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all administrative accounts, and monitor logs for unusual configuration changes related to authentication settings. Network segmentation should be enforced to limit access to Ivanti management interfaces, ideally restricting them to trusted management networks or VPNs. Additionally, organizations should conduct regular vulnerability assessments and penetration testing focused on secure access infrastructure. Incident response plans should be updated to include scenarios involving unauthorized changes to authentication configurations. Finally, consider deploying anomaly detection tools that can alert on unexpected changes in authentication policies or access patterns.