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Medium

Arbitrary File Read via Symlink Handling in Ivanti Connect Secure / Policy Secure / ZTA Gateway / Neurons for Secure Access

IdentifiersCVE-2025-5468CWE-61· UNIX Symbolic Link (Symlink)…

CVE-2025-5468 is an improper handling of symbolic links vulnerability affecting Ivanti Connect Secure before 22.7R2.8 or 22.8R2, Ivanti Policy Secure before 22.7R1.5, Ivanti ZTA Gateway before 22.8R2.3-723, and Ivanti Neurons for Secure Access before 22.8R1.4. The flaw is mapped to CWE-61 and allows a local authenticated attacker to abuse symlink handling to cause the product to read files outside the intended scope, resulting in arbitrary file read from disk. The available source material does not identify the specific vulnerable function or code path.

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ANALYST BRIEF

Impact, mitigation & remediation

What it means. What to do now. Patch path, mitigations, and the assume-compromise checklist.

Impact

What an attacker gets, and what they’ve been doing with it.

Successful exploitation allows a local authenticated attacker to read arbitrary files on the affected system. This can expose sensitive system information and potentially disclose configuration data, credentials, keys, tokens, logs, or other files accessible to the vulnerable process, depending on deployment-specific file permissions and product behavior.

Mitigation

If you can’t patch tonight, do this now.

If immediate patching is not possible, reduce opportunities for local authenticated access to the appliance or host, strictly limit which users can authenticate locally, and monitor for suspicious file-access behavior involving symlinks and unexpected reads of sensitive files. Because exploitation requires local authenticated access, hardening account access and minimizing shell or local execution capability can reduce exposure. However, no vendor-specific workaround beyond upgrading was provided in the source material.

Remediation

Patch, then assume compromise.

Upgrade affected products to fixed versions released by Ivanti. For Ivanti Connect Secure, upgrade to 22.7R2.8 or 22.8R2. For Ivanti Policy Secure, upgrade to 22.7R1.5. For Ivanti ZTA Gateway, upgrade to 22.8R2.3-723. For Ivanti Neurons for Secure Access, upgrade to 22.8R1.4; Ivanti stated the fix was deployed to cloud environments on 2025-08-02 and no additional customer action is required there. Ivanti also noted that Pulse Connect Secure 9.x does not receive backported fixes and should be upgraded to a supported platform.
PUBLIC EXPLOITS

Exploits

No public exploits tracked yet. Mallory keeps watching.

VALID 0 / 0 TOTALView more in app

No public exploit code observed for this vulnerability.

EXPOSURE SURFACE

Affected products & vendors

Products and vendors Mallory has correlated with this vulnerability. Open in Mallory to drill down to specific CPE configurations and version ranges.

VendorProductType
IvantiConnect Secureapplication
IvantiNeurons For Secure Accessapplication
IvantiPolicy Secureapplication
IvantiZero Trust Access Gatewayapplication

Vendor-confirmed product mapping. Mallory continuously reconciles this list against your asset inventory.

What this page doesn’t show

The version that knows your environment.

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Exposure mapping

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Threat actor evidence

Every observed campaign linking this CVE to a named adversary.

Associated malware

Malware families riding this exploit, with evidence and IOCs.

Detection signatures

YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.

Vendor-by-vendor mapping

Cross-references every affected SKU, including bundled OEM variants.

Social activity1

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