Critical Gitea Flaw Under Active Exploitation, Researchers Warn

Threat actors are exploiting a vulnerability in Gitea’s reverse-proxy authentication mechanism to access internet-accessible instances by supplying only a valid username.

Specific to Gitea’s official Docker images, the critical-severity security defect is tracked as CVE-2026-20896 (CVSS score of 9.8) and can be exploited with a single HTTP header, Sysdig Sr. Director of Threat Research Michael Clark says.

The issue exists because, in Gitea Docker images before 1.26.3, the default settings allow connections from any source IP address instead of enforcing an allowlist, security researcher Ali Mustafa, who was credited for finding the bug, explains.

If placed behind a proxy, Gitea should trust only a header set by the proxy when reverse-proxy authentication is enabled. Because of the flaw, anyone who could provide a valid username in a header could connect to a vulnerable instance, bypassing authentication.

“Any process that can reach the Gitea container’s HTTP port directly — not through the intended authenticating proxy — can impersonate any user whose login name is known or guessable. Admin accounts are the obvious targets,” the researcher notes.

The patch that was introduced in Gitea versions 1.26.3 / 1.26.4 makes reverse-proxy authentication an opt-in feature.

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According to Clark, CVE-2026-20896’s exploitation started 13 days after public disclosure. The attempt was associated with a “VPN-exit scanner that grabbed access”.

“No password. No token. One header. Sysdig sensors caught the first in-the-wild hit 13 days after the advisory,” Clark notes.

While Sysdig’s research revealed approximately 6,200 Gitea instances accessible from the internet, it is unclear how many of them are vulnerable.

Users are advised to update their Gitea deployments as soon as possible, as the successful exploitation of the vulnerability could lead to the complete compromise of all the code and secrets Gitea holds.

“A Gitea user can read and write their repositories, private ones included: the code they ship, the secrets developers committed by accident (API keys, DB credentials, deploy tokens), their CI/CD config, and deploy keys,” Clark notes.

https://www.securityweek.com/critical-gitea-flaw-under-active-exploitation-researchers-warn/

Critical Adobe ColdFusion Vulnerability Exploited in Attacks

Threat actors are exploiting a recently patched vulnerability in Adobe ColdFusion that carries a maximum severity rating.

Tracked as CVE-2026-48282 (CVSS score of 10/10), the security defect is described as a path traversal that could lead to arbitrary code execution.

It was patched on June 30 alongside five other max severity flaws in Adobe’s rapid application development platform that could be exploited for code execution.

Adobe released ColdFusion 2025 update 10 and ColdFusion 2023 update 21 to resolve these flaws, noting that it was not aware of any exploits in the wild targeting them.

However, the tech giant did assign a priority rating of 1 to the security update, urging users to apply the patches as soon as possible, given the high risk that attackers could start targeting the flaws.

However, according to the vulnerability intelligence platform KEVIntel, hackers began exploiting CVE-2026-48282 within two hours of its public disclosure.

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“KEVIntel captured in-the-wild exploitation within our global honeypot network,” KEVIntel founder Ryan Dewhurst said.

Shortly after, the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security also warned that the CVE has been exploited in attacks, based on open source reporting.

Adobe has yet to update its advisory to mention the vulnerability’s in-the-wild exploitation. SecurityWeek has emailed the company for a statement and will update this article if it responds.

“Adobe moved quickly to release a patch, but we’re seeing how dramatically the decision window has compressed. According to reports, attackers began exploiting the vulnerability within two hours of public disclosure, well before many organizations could realistically validate, prioritize, test, and deploy patches across production environments,” Tuskira co-founder and CEO Piyush Sharma commented.

“The challenge is determining which systems are reachable, which vulnerabilities create attack paths, and what compensating controls can reduce exposure while remediation is underway. As the window between disclosure and exploitation continues to shrink, organizations will increasingly compete on the speed and quality of their security decisions,” Sharma added.

https://www.securityweek.com/critical-adobe-coldfusion-vulnerability-exploited-in-attacks/

Linux Kernel Vulnerability Allows VM Escape on Intel and AMD Systems

A newly disclosed Linux kernel vulnerability can be exploited to escape virtual machines (VMs) and execute code on the underlying host, security researchers warn.

Tracked as CVE-2026-53359 and referred to as Januscape, the security defect impacts the shadow MMU code in Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor.

The guest-to-host vulnerability poses a major threat to multi-tenant x86 public clouds running untrusted guests and exposing nested virtualization. It is known to be the first KVM exploit that can be triggered on both Intel and AMD architectures.

The flaw was discovered by security researcher Hyunwoo Kim (@v4bel), who demonstrated it as a zero-day in Google kvmCTF, the bug bounty program that works like a CTF event and offers up to $250,000 for full VM escape weaknesses.

According to Kim, the vulnerability is a use-after-free vulnerability that can be triggered from the VM to corrupt the shadow page state of the host’s kernel.

Successful exploitation of Januscape, the researcher explains, can lead to the full compromise of the host on which the VM is running.

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“For example, an attacker who has rented just a single instance on a public cloud could panic the host kernel to take down every other tenant VM on the same physical machine (DoS), or run code with root privilege on the host to take over the host and all the guests on it (RCE),” Kim explains.

On certain Linux distributions, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the security defect can be exploited by unprivileged users to escalate their privileges to root.

Januscape’s exploitation requires root privileges on the guest machine, which is typically available by default when a user is allocated a VM instance on a public cloud. If root access is not available, an attacker could chain the flaw with a privilege escalation bug, such as Dirty Frag, Kim says.

CVE-2026-53359 stayed dormant in the Linux kernel for 16 years. It was patched in mainline on June 19, when commit 81ccda30b4e8 was merged.

https://www.securityweek.com/linux-kernel-vulnerability-allows-vm-escape-on-intel-and-amd-systems/

Proof-of-Concept Exploit Released for Linux ‘Bad Epoll’ Root Access Vulnerability

Technical details and proof-of-concept (PoC) code targeting a recent Linux kernel vulnerability that could allow unprivileged processes to gain root privileges on desktops, servers, and Android phones are now public.

The security defect, tracked as CVE-2026-46242 (CVSS score of 7.8) and referred to as Bad Epoll, is described as a race-condition use-after-free bug in epoll, the Linux kernel’s I/O event notification facility.

Instead of asking programs to poll many file descriptors one by one, the Linux kernel maintains an epoll instance with an interest list and a ready list of file descriptors and return descriptors.

Bad Epoll is a close-vs-close race condition in epoll’s file-release path that leads to use-after-free.

If one eventpoll list of file descriptors monitors another and the two are closed simultaneously, one frees an object while the other continues to write to it.

The flaw was discovered by Jaeyoung Chung of Seoul National University’s Computer Security Lab, who reported it to Google kernelCTF as a zero-day submission.

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Bad Epoll was introduced in 2023 in a commit that also introduced CVE-2026-43074, another race condition in the epoll code that was found by Anthropic’s Mythos.

Mythos likely missed it because, with CVE-2026-43074 fixed, Bad Epoll doesn’t trigger KASAN (Kernel Address Sanitizer), the Linux kernel’s dynamic memory error detector.

“Bad Epoll was hard to fix, too. The maintainers’ first patch did not fully fix the issue, and a correct patch landed only two months after the bug was first reported. That is a long time for a kernel that usually handles security issues with urgency,” the researcher notes.

Chung has published a PoC exploit that triggers Bad Epoll to leak kernel memory and hijack an indirect call to control the CPU’s instruction pointer register and obtain root privileges via a Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) chain.

Linux distributions based on kernel version 6.4 or newer are affected by the vulnerability. Bad Epoll was also confirmed on Pixel 10 devices, which are running kernel version 6.6.

https://www.securityweek.com/proof-of-concept-exploit-released-for-linux-bad-epoll-root-access-vulnerability/

Critical Cursor AI Code Editor Flaws Could Lead to OS-Level Remote Code Execution

Two critical vulnerabilities in the popular AI code editor Cursor could lead to remote code execution on the underlying operating system, Cato Networks reports.

The security defects are tracked as CVE-2026-50548 and CVE-2026-50549 (CVSS score of 9.8) and are referred to as DuneSlide, given that they lead to remote code execution (RCE) outside of the IDE’s sandbox.

According to Cato, the flaws abuse Cursor’s automatic terminal command execution inside the sandbox, which does not prompt the user for approval, and can be triggered when a victim prompts the IDE to ingest an attacker-controlled payload.

The first issue is related to the sandbox’s security boundaries. While command execution should be restricted to the current working directory, a non-default value assigned to the working_directory parameter results in the path being added to the allow list.

Thus, an innocuous MCP server request could inject a prompt that would instruct the LLM to set the working directory to an attacker-supplied path outside the project scope.

A threat actor could overwrite the cursorsandbox executable, ensuring that “future commands run without sandbox restrictions, so future instructions within the same prompt injection lead to a non-sandboxed RCE,” Cato explains.

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Completely independent from this vulnerability, the second security defect affects the IDE’s file path resolution edge cases and could be exploited via symbolic links to bypass out-of-bounds write protections.

An attacker could craft a prompt that, when injected in Cursor, instructs the agent to create within the project directory a symlink pointing to an outside file.

A flaw in the agent’s path canonicalization logic (it attempts to resolve the symlink to determine its location and verify it is in the project’s directory) results in Cursor falling back to using the original symlink path.

“A threat actor can then create a write-only symlink, thus forcing Cursor to assume the resolved path is the symlink path, rather than the target path. This fails its detection that the ultimate destination is out of bounds, allowing the threat actor to link to the cursorsandbox executable once more,” Cato explains.

Cato reported the two flaws to Cursor in February. Patches for both were included in Cursor 3.0, which was released on April 2, while the CVE IDs were assigned in early June.

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https://www.securityweek.com/critical-cursor-ai-ide-flaws-could-lead-to-os-level-remote-code-execution/

Amazon Q Flaw Enabled Cloud Credential Theft via Malicious Repositories

Researchers at Wiz have disclosed a high-severity vulnerability in the Amazon Q Developer extension for Visual Studio Code that could allow attackers to steal developers’ cloud credentials by luring them into opening a booby-trapped code repository.

Amazon Q Developer is an AI-powered coding assistant that offers developers features such as code suggestions, automated refactoring, and access to external tools and services via integrations with local processes.

AWS was notified about the issue on April 20 and a patch was released on May 12. The cloud giant published a security advisory this week.

The root cause of the vulnerability was that the extension would automatically act on configuration files embedded in a workspace without first asking the user for permission.

That meant a malicious repository could quietly run attacker-controlled commands in the background the moment a developer opened it, gaining access to whatever cloud credentials and API keys were loaded in their environment at the time.

Attack path examples include fake coding tests like those used by North Korean hackers, a typosquatted open source package, or a malicious pull request to a popular project, Wiz said.

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Developers authenticated to AWS or other cloud services would be particularly exposed, since active session credentials could be captured and exfiltrated without any visible warning.

“The combination of auto-execution, shell spawning, and environment inheritance created a high-severity vulnerability in a widely-used developer tool. A single malicious repository could compromise not just the developer’s local machine, but their cloud infrastructure as well,” Wiz noted.

AWS has patched the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-12957, and a related issue involving symbolic link handling (CVE-2026-12958).

Fixes are available across all affected Amazon Q Developer plugins covering VS Code, JetBrains, Eclipse, and Visual Studio, as well as the language server.

“We would like to thank Wiz for collaborating with us on this issue. We have remediated this issue in language server version 1.65.0,” an AWS spokesperson told SecurityWeek.

“The AWS Language Server updates automatically unless the customer’s network configuration prevents it, so no action is required in most cases. For existing customers, reloading the IDE will trigger an update to the latest language server version, which includes this fix. If auto-update is blocked, we recommend upgrading to the latest version of the Amazon Q Developer plugin for your IDE. New customers require no action, as the latest patched version will be downloaded automatically,” the AWS spokesperson added.

Wiz noted that the underlying issue is not unique to Amazon Q; other researchers have identified similar problems in VS Code and other AI coding tools, including Claude and Cursor.

The Google-owned cloud security giant published technical details and PoC code on Friday.

https://www.securityweek.com/amazon-q-flaw-enabled-cloud-credential-theft-via-malicious-repositories/

Lantronix Serial-to-IP Converter Flaw Exploited in Attacks After OT Threat Warning

A vulnerability that can facilitate attacks on operational technology (OT) systems is being exploited in the wild, according to the cybersecurity agency CISA.

The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2025-67038 and it affects Lantronix EDS5000 serial-to-IP device servers, which enable organizations to remotely connect to and manage their serial devices.

The flaw can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker to inject arbitrary OS commands into a username parameter, which leads to the execution of the commands with root privileges.

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CVE-2025-67038 was one of the 20 serial-to-IP product vulnerabilities disclosed by cybersecurity firm Forescout in April.

Collectively tracked as BRIDGE:BREAK, the vulnerabilities impact Lantronix and Silex products, and researchers demonstrated how they can be exploited to manipulate sensor readings in industrial and healthcare environments to conceal dangerous conditions that would normally require human intervention, or to cause disruption in a healthcare environment using malicious firmware.

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CISA added CVE-2025-67038 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog on June 23, instructing federal agencies to address it by June 26.

However, there do not appear to be any public reports describing the attacks exploiting the Lantronix product vulnerability. It’s unclear if the attacks are aimed at industrial, healthcare, or other OT environments.

Cybersecurity firm Aviatrix has described a potential attack scenario involving CVE-2025-67038. Once the attacker exploits the vulnerability to execute code with root privileges, they can gain full control of the device.

“The compromised device serves as a foothold for the attacker to move laterally within the network, targeting other connected systems. The attacker establishes a command and control channel to remotely manage the compromised device and issue further commands,” Aviatrix explained in an advisory.

It added, “Sensitive data is exfiltrated from the network through the compromised device. The attacker disrupts network operations by modifying configurations or deploying malware, causing significant impact to the organization’s infrastructure.”

ZoomEye shows thousands of internet-exposed Lantronix systems — a majority in the United States — but these include all Lantronix products and it’s unclear how many of them are vulnerable to attacks.

Lantronix has not responded to SecurityWeek’s request for comment regarding in-the-wild exploitation.

UPDATE: Forescout published a blog post on Thursday with additional details on the exploitation of the vulnerability. Researchers observed exploitation of CVE-2025-67038 in a Lantronix EDS5000 honeypot on April 5, after Lantronix released a patch, but before Forescout published BRIDGE:BREAK technical details, which suggests the attackers may have reverse-engineered the patch to develop an exploit.

The activity included automated command injection testing and Lantronix-specific fingerprinting, suggesting the attackers knew what they were targeting.

Researchers found the activity was not consistent with a typical botnet or broad vulnerability scanner.

https://www.securityweek.com/lantronix-serial-to-ip-converter-flaw-exploited-in-attacks-after-ot-threat-warning/

GitLab Patches Code Execution, Information Disclosure Vulnerabilities

GitLab has rolled out Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) security updates that resolve 13 vulnerabilities, including three high-severity bugs.

The most severe is CVE-2026-10086, an XSS flaw in the Analytics dashboard of GitLab EE, rooted in the improper sanitization of user-supplied input.

According to GitLab, the security defect could have allowed an authenticated user with developer rights to execute arbitrary client-side code in the context of other users’ sessions.

Next in line is CVE-2026-10712, an XSS in the Web IDE workbench asset handler that could have allowed unauthenticated attackers to execute JavaScript code in users’ browser sessions.

The third high-severity vulnerability is CVE-2026-12053, described as an insufficient output filtering in Duo Workflows, which could have allowed users to access sensitive information already committed to a project.

The fresh GitLab CE/EE updates also resolve seven medium-severity flaws, including authorization bypass, incorrect authorization, insufficient filtering, improper input validation, and improper access control issues.

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Successful exploitation of these bugs could have led to settings tampering, confidential information disclosure, DAST site profile secrets exfiltration, sensitive information being written to logs, content concealment, Maven package metadata overwrite, and package metadata disclosure.

Patches for all these flaws were included in GitLab CE/EE versions 19.1.1, 19.0.3, and 18.11.6. Users are advised to update their deployments as soon as possible.

“These versions contain important bug and security fixes, and we strongly recommend that all self-managed GitLab installations be upgraded to one of these versions immediately. GitLab.com is already running the patched version,” GitLab notes.

https://www.securityweek.com/gitlab-patches-code-execution-information-disclosure-vulnerabilities/

25-Year-Old Vulnerability Patched in Curl

The open source data transfer tool and library curl has been updated this week with patches for 18 vulnerabilities, including one introduced 25 years ago.

The flaws, four medium and 14 low-severity, were discovered as part of a community effort after Anthropic’s Mythos discovered a single curl bug in early May.

This release resolves the highest number of CVEs patched with a single curl update, including an issue that was introduced in version 7.7, shipped on March 22, 2001.

Tracked as CVE-2026-8932, it is described as an mTLS connection reuse and could lead to authentication bypass. It affects libcurl applications and not the curl command-line tool.

The CVE exists because “libcurl could reuse an existing connection even after client certificate or private key settings had changed,” vulnerability management firm Aisle says.

Aisle used its AI platform to identify multiple weaknesses across curl and libcurl, six of which were issued a CVE this year, CVE-2026-8932 included.

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The other identified flaws include credential confusion (CVE-2026-8926), double-free (CVE-2026-8925), use-after-free (CVE-2026-9080 and CVE-2026-10536), and improper host validation (CVE-2026-9547).

As the company suggests, it’s no surprise that Mythos found a single curl bug and that few security issues are being surfaced in the popular tool and library.

“Curl is of particular interest to security researchers: the easy bugs are long gone, and what remains is difficult to find: old protocol paths, state reuse, callback behavior, credential selection, and code paths that are easily forgotten about,” Aisle says.

Over 30 billion devices use curl today for data transfer, including servers, phones, and cars, and vulnerabilities in it could prove highly valuable to attackers. However, there have been no public reports of successful in-the-wild exploitation of any security defect in curl.

https://www.securityweek.com/25-year-old-vulnerability-patched-in-curl/

Chrome 149 Update Resolves 18 Severe Vulnerabilities

Google on Wednesday rolled out a new Chrome 149 update that resolves 18 vulnerabilities, including four critical and 14 high-severity security defects.

More than half of the addressed issues, including three critical and seven high-severity, are use-after-free flaws, a type of memory corruption bug that could lead to remote code execution (RCE).

In Chrome, use-after-free vulnerabilities can be combined with security holes in the underlying operating system or in a privileged browser process to escape the sandbox.

The remaining eight issues patched in this update are out-of-bounds read, inappropriate implementation, uninitialized use, and insufficient validation of untrusted input bugs.

Per Google’s advisory, the most severe of the flaws was reported by an anonymous researcher. The company has yet to disclose the bug bounty amount to be rewarded for the report.

The remaining 17 security defects were discovered by Google, a trend that has been ongoing for the past couple of months, likely fueled by the use of AI.

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Also notable is the fact that, following a spike in new vulnerability discoveries in April and May, which culminated in a massive batch of 429 patches in early June, the number of fresh security weaknesses addressed with each new Chrome release has dropped into the lower two digits.

Google makes no mention of any of the newly resolved vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild.

The latest Chrome iteration is now rolling out as versions 149.0.7827.196/197 for Windows and macOS and as version 149.0.7827.196 for Linux.

https://www.securityweek.com/chrome-149-update-resolves-18-severe-vulnerabilities/