CVE-2026-24061
CRITICALCVE-2026-24061 is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.8) CWE-88 vulnerability. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2026-01-26) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2026-01-26. 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-2026-24061.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2026-24061 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
telnetd in GNU Inetutils through 2.7 allows remote authentication bypass via a "-f root" value for the USER environment variable.
Affected Products
debian linuxdebianinetutilsgnuDetection & 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`).
Remediation status
No fixed release is recorded for CVE-2026-24061 yet. Track the upstream advisory, and apply the exposure-reduction steps below in the meantime.
Mitigate without a patch
Put an independent control in front of the weakness: restrict the affected endpoint or interface to trusted networks, require an additional authentication factor or proxy-level check, and invalidate existing sessions and credentials in case the flaw has already been used.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-24061 in your dependencies?
Find it across , including transitive dependencies.