CVE-2026-16812 — Velocloud Orchestrator
CRITICALCVE-2026-16812 is a critical-severity (CVSS 10) OS Command Injection vulnerability in arista velocloud orchestrator. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2026-07-27) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. A fix is available — see the affected versions and patch details below.
VeloCloud Orchestrator (VCO) on-prem has a security issue where this issue may allow a remote attacker to access privileged internal functionality and impact the VCO host. Successful…
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2026-07-27. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2026-07-30.
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA (KEV catalog and SSVC triage) for CVE-2026-16812.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2026-16812 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 395,492 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
VeloCloud Orchestrator (VCO) on-prem has a security issue where this issue may allow a remote attacker to access privileged internal functionality and impact the VCO host. Successful exploitation may compromise the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the orchestrator and data managed by the orchestrator.
This functionality was intended to be for internal use only and is not intended to be remotely accessible.
Hosted and Dedicated versions of VCO have already been patched in advance of this notice going out.
This issue was discovered externally and is known to be actively exploited.
Affected Products
velocloud orchestratoraristaDetection & mitigation playbook
Vendor / applianceDetect
Inventory every arista velocloud orchestrator deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.
Fix
Apply the arista velocloud orchestrator security patch or hotfix for CVE-2026-16812 on the affected version, following the vendor advisory for your exact build.
Workarounds
Stop passing untrusted input into the interpreter or shell: call the affected binary with an argument array rather than a composed command string, reject anything outside a strict allowlist of expected values, and run the component under an account that cannot reach beyond the work it legitimately does. Alongside that, restrict the management interface to trusted networks and apply the vendor's recommended configuration mitigations.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-16812 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.