Security researchers have disclosed four new vulnerabilities in Spring Cloud Config Server, affecting versions 3.1.x, 4.1.x, 4.2.x, 4.3.x, and 5.0.x, along with older unsupported releases. The flaws range from medium to critical severity and could expose sensitive files, secrets, and system resources to attackers. Experts warn that organizations using vulnerable deployments face risks including unauthorized data access, manipulation of system directories, and leakage of confidential information. Administrators are strongly advised to patch affected systems immediately to reduce the chances of exploitation. The most severe issue, CVE-2026-40982, is a critical directory traversal vulnerability in the spring-cloud-config-server module. Attackers can send specially crafted URL requests to access arbitrary text or binary files stored on the server without authentication, potentially exposing sensitive configuration data and credentials. Another high severity flaw, CVE-2026-40981, impacts deployments using Google Secrets Manager as the backend. Malicious clients may craft requests that expose secrets belonging to unintended Google Cloud Platform projects, creating serious risks for organizations relying on centralized cloud secret storage. Researchers also identified CVE-2026-41002, a high severity time of check time of use vulnerability affecting the Git repository base directory used by Spring Cloud Config Server. This race condition could allow attackers to manipulate files during repository cloning operations. In addition, CVE-2026-41004 is a medium severity logging flaw that writes sensitive information in plain text whenever trace logging is enabled, increasing the likelihood of credential exposure and unauthorized access through compromised log files. To protect vulnerable environments, organizations should upgrade immediately to patched releases, including versions 4.3.3 and 5.0.3 for open source users, while enterprise customers can access fixes 3.1.14, 4.1.10, and 4.2.7 through VMware support. Administrators unable to patch immediately should enable spring.cloud.config.server.gcp-secret-manager.token-mandatory=true, restrict unnecessary trace logging, monitor repositories carefully, and review exposed systems for indicators of compromise or suspicious activity across critical production environments globally.
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