Denial of Service in Splunk LDAP bind handling
CVE-2025-20370 is a denial-of-service vulnerability affecting Splunk Enterprise versions below 10.0.1, 9.4.4, 9.3.6, and 9.2.8, and Splunk Cloud Platform versions below 9.3.2411.108, 9.3.2408.118, and 9.2.2406.123. A user assigned a role containing the high-privilege capability change_authentication can send multiple LDAP bind requests to a specific internal endpoint. Processing these repeated bind requests can drive server CPU usage to a high level and destabilize the instance. The provided information indicates the issue is tied to resource consumption caused by repeated LDAP bind operations against an internal authentication-related endpoint.
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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.
Mitigation
If you can’t patch tonight, do this now.
change_authentication capability to only strictly necessary roles and users. More generally, reduce exposure of privileged authentication-management functionality and monitor for abnormal volumes of LDAP bind activity targeting internal endpoints. If operationally feasible, disabling Splunk Web when not required was recommended by Splunk as a temporary mitigation across the advisory set, though the most directly relevant mitigation for this issue is limiting access to the required privilege.Remediation
Patch, then assume compromise.
Exploits
No public exploits tracked yet. Mallory keeps watching.
No public exploit code observed for this vulnerability.
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.
Vendor-confirmed product mapping. Mallory continuously reconciles this list against your asset inventory.
Recent activity
4 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
A denial-of-service vulnerability in Splunk where users with the change_authentication privilege can overload the server with LDAP bind requests.
A medium-severity DoS vulnerability in Splunk Enterprise and Cloud Platform where a user with change_authentication capability can cause high CPU usage and require a restart.
The version that knows your environment.
Query your assets running an affected version, and investigate the blast radius.
Every observed campaign linking this CVE to a named adversary.
Malware families riding this exploit, with evidence and IOCs.
YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.
Cross-references every affected SKU, including bundled OEM variants.
Community discussion across Reddit, Mastodon, and other social sources.