Tag Archives: vulnerability

About Elevation of Privilege - Linux Kernel "Fragnesia" (CVE-2026-46300) vulnerability

About Elevation of Privilege - Linux Kernel Fragnesia (CVE-2026-46300) vulnerability

About Elevation of Privilege - Linux Kernel "Fragnesia" (CVE-2026-46300) vulnerability. The vulnerability was discovered by researcher William Bowling together with the V12 team. Fragnesia belongs to the class of Dirty Frag vulnerabilities. It is an error in the ESP/XFRM subsystem, distinct from Dirty Frag, which was addressed with a separate patch. It allows achieving arbitrary byte writes into the kernel page cache of read-only files, without requiring any race condition.

🛠 Technical details and exploit code were published on May 15. The public exploit modifies the contents of /usr/bin/su in the kernel page cache, and then executes /usr/bin/su, resulting in the user obtaining a root shell. The on-disk binary is never modified. A reboot or cache flush restores normal system behavior.

⚙️ Fragnesia affects the same kernel versions as Dirty Frag. Any distribution shipping a kernel without the May 13 patch is vulnerable. The vulnerability was confirmed on Ubuntu 6.8.0-111-generic (April 11, 2026 build). Monitor kernel package updates for your Linux distribution(s).

For systems where a kernel update is not possible, the same workaround as for Dirty Frag is effective (blacklisting modules). Systems where the Dirty Frag workaround has already been applied are already protected against Fragnesia. Systems that only received Dirty Frag updates without applying the workaround remain vulnerable and require new updates addressing Fragnesia.

May "In the Trend of VM" (#27): high-profile vulnerabilities in Linux, ActiveMQ, SharePoint, and Adobe Acrobat Reader

May In the Trend of VM (#27): high-profile vulnerabilities in Linux, ActiveMQ, SharePoint, and Adobe Acrobat Reader

May "In the Trend of VM" (#27): high-profile vulnerabilities in Linux, ActiveMQ, SharePoint, and Adobe Acrobat Reader. Presenting the traditional monthly roundup of trending vulnerabilities according to Positive Technologies. While the previous April edition featured only one vulnerability, this one includes four, covering different technologies and attack scenarios.

🗞 Post on Habr (rus)
🗒 Digest on the PT website (rus)

🔻 EoP - Linux Kernel "Copy Fail" (CVE-2026-31431). The vulnerability allows an attacker to gain root privileges.

🔻 RCE - Apache ActiveMQ (CVE-2026-34197). A vulnerability in a solution widely used in enterprise systems and integration platforms.

🔻 Spoofing - Microsoft SharePoint Server (CVE-2026-32201). A vulnerability in a Microsoft solution widely used in enterprise systems for collaboration, document management, and internal portal development.

🔻 RCE - Adobe Reader (CVE-2026-34621). A vulnerability in a widely used PDF document viewer; actively exploited in phishing attacks.

🟥 The full list of trending vulnerabilities is available on the portal

May Microsoft Patch Tuesday

May Microsoft Patch Tuesday

May Microsoft Patch Tuesday. A total of 119 vulnerabilities, approximately 1.5 times fewer than in April. There are currently no vulnerabilities marked as actively exploited in the wild. However, there is one vulnerability with a public exploit:

🔸 EoP - Windows Kernel (CVE-2026-40369). A detailed write-up and exploit for this vulnerability were published on May 14, two days after the May MSPT. The researcher describes exploitation of the vulnerability as follows: "A single syscall from any unprivileged process — including inside Chrome's renderer sandbox — can increment arbitrary kernel memory addresses. No race conditions. No heap spray. No special tokens. 100% deterministic privilege escalation to SYSTEM."

Among the remaining ones, the following stand out:

🔹 RCE - Windows DNS Client (CVE-2026-41096). A ZDI analyst commented on this vulnerability as follows: "This patch fixes a heap-based buffer overflow in the DNS Client triggered by a malicious DNS response. No authentication or user interaction needed, and since the DNS Client runs on virtually every Windows machine, the attack surface is enormous. An attacker with a position to influence DNS responses (MitM, rogue server) could achieve unauthenticated RCE across your enterprise."

🔹 RCE - Windows Netlogon (CVE-2026-41089). The vulnerability allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a domain controller by sending a specially crafted network request. Exploitation does not require credentials or user interaction, which classifies this vulnerability as wormable. Compromise of a domain controller means full compromise of the organization's entire domain. A Rapid7 analyst added in their commentary: "No privileges or user interaction are required, and attack complexity is low, which suggests that creation of a reliable exploit might not be especially difficult for anyone with knowledge of the specific mechanism. Microsoft assesses exploitation as less likely, but since those exploitability assessments are provided without an accompanying explanation, it's not clear how much reassurance defenders should take. Anyone who remembers the much-discussed CVE-2020-1472 (aka ZeroLogon) back in 2020 will note that CVE-2026-41089 offers an attacker more immediate control of a domain controller. Patches are available for all versions of Windows Server from 2012 onwards."

🔹 RCE - Windows TCP/IP (CVE-2026-40415). Commentary from a ZDI analyst: "This bug in the TCP/IP stack results from a use-after-free (UAF) and could allow a remote, unauthenticated threat actor to execute code without user interaction. That makes this another wormable bug. However, this one is much less likely to be exploited. The target needs to be under sustained low-memory (memory pressure) conditions, which is pretty rare."

🔹 RCE - Microsoft Word (CVE-2026-40361, CVE-2026-40364, CVE-2026-40366, CVE-2026-40367). An attacker can exploit these vulnerabilities through social engineering by sending a malicious file to a targeted victim. Successful exploitation would grant the attacker arbitrary code execution. Microsoft researchers note that the Preview Pane is an attack vector for each of these vulnerabilities.

🔹 RCE - Microsoft Office (CVE-2026-40363, CVE-2026-42831). A heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability in Microsoft Office may allow an unauthorized attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code.

🔹 RCE - Windows GDI (CVE-2026-35421). A heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability in the Windows GDI component may allow an unauthorized attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code.

🔹 RCE - Microsoft Dynamics 365 On-Premises (CVE-2026-42898). Commentary from a ZDI analyst: "It allows any authenticated user to execute code with a scope change, meaning exploitation can break out and affect resources beyond the vulnerable component itself. Scope changes are pretty rare, so if you're running Dynamics 365 On-Prem, definitely test and deploy this patch quickly."

🔹 EoP - Windows Kernel (CVE-2026-33841, CVE-2026-35420, CVE-2026-40369). CVE-2026-33841 and CVE-2026-40369 are rated "Exploitation More Likely". A local attacker can use these vulnerabilities to elevate privileges to SYSTEM level. In the case of CVE-2026-33841, the attacker can elevate privileges to Medium/High integrity level.

🗒 Full Vulristics report

About Remote Code Execution - Apache ActiveMQ (CVE-2026-34197) vulnerability

About Remote Code Execution - Apache ActiveMQ (CVE-2026-34197) vulnerability

About Remote Code Execution - Apache ActiveMQ (CVE-2026-34197) vulnerability. Apache ActiveMQ is a popular open-source message broker written in Java. Its main purpose is to send messages between different services, systems, and microservices without a direct connection between them.

This vulnerability is from the April Linux Patch Wednesday. Details about this vulnerability were published on April 7 in the HORIZON3.ai company blog. They claim that the Apache ActiveMQ Classic vulnerability has been hiding in plain sight for 13 years. An attacker can invoke a management operation through ActiveMQ's Jolokia API to trick the broker into fetching a remote configuration file and running arbitrary OS commands. As a result, the attacker can gain access to sensitive information, including messages, credentials, and configuration files, deploy malware, or use the compromised server to conduct further attacks within the internal infrastructure.

The vulnerability requires credentials, but default credentials (admin:admin) are common in many environments. On some versions (6.0.0–6.1.1), no credentials are required at all due to another vulnerability, CVE-2024-32114, which inadvertently exposes the Jolokia API without authentication. In those versions, CVE-2026-34197 is effectively an unauthenticated RCE.

🛠 Public exploits have been available on GitHub since April 8.

👾 Indicators of exploitation in the wild were observed by FortiGuard experts on April 13. The vulnerability was added to the CISA KEV catalog on April 16.

🌐 According to data from The Shadowserver Foundation, as of May 14, approximately 7,000 vulnerable Apache ActiveMQ servers remain exposed on the internet.

⚙️ According to the vendor bulletin, the vulnerability has been fixed in ActiveMQ versions 5.19.4 and 6.2.3. However, according to HORIZON3.ai, it was fixed in 5.19.6 and 6.2.5. It is better to install newer versions. 😉

Про уязвимость Spoofing - Microsoft SharePoint Server (CVE-2026-32201)

Про уязвимость Spoofing - Microsoft SharePoint Server (CVE-2026-32201)

About Spoofing - Microsoft SharePoint Server (CVE-2026-32201) vulnerability. A vulnerability from the April Microsoft Patch Tuesday. The description provided by Microsoft experts is extremely vague: "Improper input validation in Microsoft Office SharePoint allows an unauthorized attacker to perform spoofing over a network. An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could view some sensitive information (Confidentiality), make changes to disclosed information (Integrity), but cannot limit access to the resource (Availability)." Spoofing is an attack in which a threat actor forges data, an address, an identifier, or a trusted source in order to impersonate a legitimate user, service, or system.

What is actually hidden behind this description? In the April review on MSPT, a ZDI expert noted that vulnerabilities of this kind in SharePoint are often associated with XSS attacks.

🛠 On April 23, an exploit was published on GitHub, whose author claims that the vulnerability can be summarized as follows: "An unauthenticated attacker can send a specially crafted HTTP request to inject malicious JavaScript (reflected XSS), which executes in the security context of the SharePoint site."

In other words, the attacker sends a specially crafted request to the SharePoint server, causing SharePoint to generate a malicious link on behalf of a trusted source. The attacker then passes this link to the user. When the user opens such a link, the injected malicious JavaScript executes in the context of SharePoint, which can be used to steal data from the current session, intercept authentication tokens, as well as perform actions on behalf of the user through the user's active session.

👾 Microsoft experts noted the vulnerability as being exploited in the wild on the day of publication of the April Microsoft Patch Tuesday, April 14. The vulnerability was added to the CISA KEV. On the same day, researchers from Defused reported coordinated reconnaissance activity targeting vulnerable SharePoint servers, which was carried out from four IP addresses between April 1 and April 11.

⚙️ Updates are available for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2016, 2019, and Subscription Edition.

About Elevation of Privilege vulnerability - Linux Kernel "Dirty Frag" (CVE-2026-43284, CVE-2026-43500) vulnerability

About Elevation of Privilege vulnerability - Linux Kernel Dirty Frag (CVE-2026-43284, CVE-2026-43500) vulnerability

About Elevation of Privilege vulnerability - Linux Kernel "Dirty Frag" (CVE-2026-43284, CVE-2026-43500) vulnerability. According to information from researcher Hyunwoo Kim (@v4bel), Dirty Frag is a vulnerability (a class of vulnerabilities) that allows a local unprivileged attacker to obtain root privileges on most Linux distributions by combining the xfrm-ESP Page-Cache Write vulnerability (CVE-2026-43284) and the RxRPC Page-Cache Write vulnerability (CVE-2026-43500). Exploitation of this chain enables the attacker to fully compromise the system: gain access to any files, disable protections, establish persistence, and use the host for further attacks.

⚙️🛠 The vulnerability chain description, technical write-up and exploit code were published on May 7. Exploitability has been confirmed on up-to-date distributions including Ubuntu 24.04.4, RHEL 10.1, openSUSE Tumbleweed, CentOS Stream 10, AlmaLinux 10, and Fedora 44. The xfrm-ESP Page-Cache Write vulnerability has been present in the kernel since commit cac2661c53f3 (2017-01-17) and up to the current upstream version, while the RxRPC Page-Cache Write vulnerability has been present in the kernel since commit 2dc334f1a63a (2023-06) and up to the current upstream version. In other words, the actual time span during which these vulnerabilities have existed in the kernel is around 9 years.

Information about the vulnerability and the exploit was published before patches were available in affected Linux distributions. According to the researcher, on May 7 he submitted detailed information about the vulnerability and the exploit to the linux-distros mailing list. The embargo was set for 5 days, with an agreement that if a third party published the exploit on the internet during the embargo period, the "Dirty Frag" exploit would be released publicly. On the same day, this is exactly what happened: the information was leaked to the public, and the embargo was violated. 🤷‍♂️ As a result, the researcher proceeded with full disclosure.

A similar high-profile vulnerability, Elevation of Privilege - Linux Kernel "Copy Fail" (CVE-2026-31431), served as the motivation for this research. As the researcher reports, the xfrm-ESP Page-Cache Write vulnerability in the Dirty Frag chain shares the same sink as Copy Fail. However, it is triggered regardless of whether the algif_aead module is available. In other words, even on systems where the publicly known Copy Fail mitigation (algif_aead blacklist) is applied, Linux remains vulnerable to Dirty Frag.

Why is a chain of two vulnerabilities used? As the researcher reports, the xfrm-ESP Page-Cache Write vulnerability provides a powerful arbitrary 4-byte STORE primitive, similar to Copy Fail, and is present in most distributions. However, its exploitation requires the privilege to create a namespace. In Ubuntu, unprivileged user namespace creation is sometimes restricted by AppArmor policy. In such an environment, xfrm-ESP Page-Cache Write cannot be triggered. The RxRPC Page-Cache Write vulnerability does not require the privilege to create a namespace, but the rxrpc.ko module itself is not included in most distributions. However, on Ubuntu, the rxrpc.ko module is loaded by default. Chaining the two variants makes the blind spots cover each other, allowing root privileges to be obtained on every major distribution.

As of May 8, the fix for the xfrm-ESP Page-Cache Write (CVE-2026-43284) vulnerability has been merged into the mainline Linux kernel, while the fix for the RxRPC Page-Cache Write (CVE-2026-43500) vulnerability has not yet been merged. It is recommended to monitor the release of security updates for CVE-2026-43284 and CVE-2026-43500 across the Linux distributions in use and apply them promptly. As a workaround, the vulnerability researcher proposes a script that prevents loading of the esp4, esp6, and rxrpc modules, attempts to unload them from the kernel, and clears the Linux memory cache:

sh -c "printf 'install esp4 /bin/false\ninstall esp6 /bin/false\ninstall rxrpc /bin/false\n' > /etc/modprobe.d/dirtyfrag.conf; rmmod esp4 esp6 rxrpc 2>/dev/null; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches; true"

👾 On May 11, the vulnerability chain was added to VulnCheck KEV, indicating that it has been exploited in the wild.

About Elevation of Privilege - Linux Kernel "Copy Fail" (CVE-2026-31431) vulnerability

About Elevation of Privilege - Linux Kernel Copy Fail (CVE-2026-31431) vulnerability

About Elevation of Privilege - Linux Kernel "Copy Fail" (CVE-2026-31431) vulnerability. A local privilege escalation vulnerability in the Linux kernel AF_ALG component, which is caused by a memory handling flaw, allows an unprivileged user to escalate privileges to root. By exploiting this vulnerability, an attacker can fully compromise the system: read and modify any files, including passwords and keys, replace system binaries, disable security controls and monitoring tools, stealthily install backdoors and maintain persistence, hide traces of their activity, and use the host as a foothold for attacks on other network assets.

⚙️🛠 On April 1, patches addressing the vulnerability were merged into the main branch of the Linux kernel. On April 22, a CVE identifier was assigned to the vulnerability. On April 29, experts from Theori published an analysis of the vulnerability and a public exploit. The vulnerability's exploitability has been confirmed on up-to-date versions of widely used Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Amazon Linux, RHEL, and SUSE.

👾 On May 1, the vulnerability was added to the CISA KEV catalog, indicating it is being exploited in the wild.

What distinguishes this vulnerability from similar EOP/LPE issues in Linux?

There have been high-profile privilege escalation vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel. Dirty COW required winning a race condition. Multiple attempts were often needed, and this sometimes led to system crashes. Dirty Pipe was tied to specific versions and required precise pipe buffer manipulation.

But unlike Dirty COW and Dirty Pipe, researchers report that Copy Fail is a straight-line logic flaw. It triggers without races, retries, or crash-prone timing windows.

🧬 Portability. The same exploit script works across all tested distributions and architectures, including Ubuntu, Amazon Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and SUSE Linux Enterprise. No per-distribution offsets. No recompilation. No version checks in the exploit.

✧ Minimalism. The entire exploit is a short Python script using only standard library modules (os, socket, zlib). It requires Python 3.10+ for os.splice. No compiled payloads, no dependency installation.

🥷 Stealth. The write bypasses the ordinary VFS write path. The corrupted page is never marked dirty by the kernel's writeback machinery. Standard file integrity tools that compare on-disk checksums will not detect it, because the on-disk file remains unchanged. Only the in-memory page cache is corrupted.

📦 Cross-container impact. The page cache is shared across all processes on the system, including across container boundaries. Copy Fail is not just a local privilege escalation. It is a container escape primitive and a vector for Kubernetes node compromise.

How to fix the vulnerability?

To remediate the vulnerability, users need to update to Linux kernel versions 6.18.22, 6.19.12, and 7.0. The kernel can be built manually, or users can wait for their Linux distribution vendor to release updated kernel packages. As of May 4, updates have been released for Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, Fedora, SUSE, CloudLinux, Arch Linux, and ROSA Linux.

As a workaround, researchers suggest blocking the creation of AF_ALG sockets:

echo "install algif_aead /bin/false" > /etc/modprobe.d/disable-algif-aead.conf
rmmod algif_aead 2>/dev/null