CVE-2026-1731 — Privileged Remote Access
CRITICALCVE-2026-1731 is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.8) OS Command Injection vulnerability in beyondtrust privileged remote access. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2026-02-13) and has been used in ransomware campaigns — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. A fix is available — see the affected versions and patch details below.
BeyondTrust Remote Support (RS) and certain older versions of Privileged Remote Access (PRA) contain a critical pre-authentication remote code execution vulnerability. By sending specially…
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2026-02-13 — including use in ransomware campaigns. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2026-02-16.
- 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-2026-1731.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2026-1731 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). In the shaded patch-first corner (EPSS 50%+, CVSS 7.0+).
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 395,249 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the ≥ 90% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
BeyondTrust Remote Support (RS) and certain older versions of Privileged Remote Access (PRA) contain a critical pre-authentication remote code execution vulnerability. By sending specially crafted requests, an unauthenticated remote attacker may be able to execute operating system commands in the context of the site user.
Affected Products
privileged remote accessbeyondtrustremote supportbeyondtrustResearch use only. For defensive security, authorized penetration testing, and academic research only. Never execute exploit code against systems without explicit written authorization.
Detection & mitigation playbook
Vendor / applianceDetect
Inventory every beyondtrust privileged remote access deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.
Fix
Apply the beyondtrust privileged remote access security patch or hotfix for CVE-2026-1731 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-2026-1731 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.