CVE-2026-20213 — clamav
HIGHCVE-2026-20213 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-120 vulnerability. A fix is available — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2026-20213.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2026-20213 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 380,526 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
A vulnerability in the PE file format parser of ClamAV could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a DoS condition, or possibly other expanded impacts, resulting from memory corruption on an affected device.
This vulnerability is due to improper boundary checks for content in PE files during scanning, which may result in an out-of-bounds buffer write. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by submitting a crafted file that contains PE content to be scanned by ClamAV on an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the ClamAV scanning process to terminate, resulting in a DoS condition on the affected software.
Affected Products
secure endpointciscoclamavclamavDetection & mitigation playbook
VulnerabilityDetect
Identify every host running the affected component and compare the installed build against the fixed version below — for source-built or distro-packaged software the version string, not a lockfile, is the source of truth (`dpkg -l`, `rpm -q`, or the binary's own `--version`).
Fix
Upgrade the affected component to the fixed release for CVE-2026-20213, or apply your distribution's backported patch — distro builds are often patched at an older version number, so check your vendor's advisory rather than the upstream version alone.
Workarounds
Stop feeding it untrusted input: reject or quarantine files and payloads from unverified sources until you can upgrade, restrict accepted formats to the ones you actually need, and run the parsing or decoding step in a least-privileged sandbox or short-lived worker so a crash or corrupted read cannot reach the rest of the process.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
This is an Important flaw in ClamAV's PE file parser, allowing an unauthenticated, remote attacker to trigger a Denial of Service by submitting a crafted PE file for scanning. The vulnerability stems from improper boundary checks, leading to memory corruption and termination of the scanning process. This could impact…
Mitigation for this issue is either not available or the currently available options do not meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base, or stability.Source: Red Hat security advisory for CVE-2026-20213 (CC BY 4.0)
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-20213 in your dependencies?
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