CVE-2026-42018 — Artifactory
HIGHCVE-2026-42018 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) Improper Authentication vulnerability in jfrog artifactory. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2026-09-11) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. A fix is available — see the affected versions and patch details below.
JFrog Artifactory could return an internal anonymous-user token to an unauthenticated caller when anonymous access is disabled, potentially exposing sensitive resources.
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2026-09-11. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2026-09-25.
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA (KEV catalog and SSVC triage) for CVE-2026-42018.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2026-42018 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 379,145 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Description
JFrog Artifactory could return an internal anonymous-user token to an unauthenticated caller when anonymous access is disabled, potentially exposing sensitive resources.
Affected Products
artifactoryjfrogDetection & mitigation playbook
Vendor / applianceDetect
Inventory every jfrog artifactory deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above. Because the exploit targets the running system rather than your application code, also watch for exploitation at the network and runtime layer — O3 flags the exploit behaviour from runtime telemetry and egress traffic even before a vulnerable build is confirmed.
Fix
Apply the jfrog artifactory security patch or hotfix for CVE-2026-42018 on the affected version, following the vendor advisory for your exact build.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands. Alongside that, restrict the management interface to trusted networks and apply the vendor's recommended configuration mitigations; O3's runtime protection blocks the exploit chain at execution on systems you cannot patch yet.
How O3 protects you
O3 detects and blocks CVE-2026-42018 exploitation at runtime: eBPF exploit-chain detection, plus L7 egress monitoring that catches the post-exploitation callback and severs the attacker's outbound channel.
Tailored to CVE-2026-42018. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
How to detect CVE-2026-42018
A community-maintained Nuclei template exists for this CVE. You can scan for it directly:
nuclei -id cve-2026-42018 -u https://target- Template
- JFrog Artifactory - Anonymous Token Disclosure via Trailing Slash Auth Bypass
- Severity
- high
- Impact
- Unauthenticated attackers can access sensitive resources by obtaining internal tokens, potentially leading to information disclosure.
- Remediation
- Update to the latest version where this issue is fixed.
Template by ProjectDiscovery nuclei-templates (theamanrawat), MIT licensed. View the full template. Scan only systems you are authorised to test.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-42018 being exploited in your environment?
O3's eBPF runtime sensors and L7 egress monitoring detect and block the CVE-2026-42018 exploit chain at execution — protecting unpatched and end-of-life systems until the vendor patch is applied.