CVE-2026-50549 — CURSOR
CRITICALCVE-2026-50549 is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.8) CWE-59 vulnerability in anysphere cursor. A fix is available — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Cursor is a code editor built for programming with AI. Prior to 3.0, Cursor runs agent terminal commands in a sandbox by default. Before a Write, the agent canonicalizes the target…
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.
- A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
- 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-2026-50549.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2026-50549 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 384,993 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
Cursor is a code editor built for programming with AI. Prior to 3.0, Cursor runs agent terminal commands in a sandbox by default. Before a Write, the agent canonicalizes the target path to confirm it stays inside the workspace, but when canonicalization fails it falls back to the original path and writes without approval. A malicious agent can create an in-workspace symlink that points outside the workspace and force canonicalization to fail — either because the target does not exist or because read permission is removed from the path — so the agent writes through the symlink to an arbitrary location without approval. A malicious agent could write arbitrary files outside the workspace under the user's privileges. This enables non-sandboxed Remote Code Execution — for example by overwriting the cursorsandbox helper so later commands run unsandboxed — with no user interaction beyond a benign prompt. This vulnerability is fixed in 3.0.
Affected Products
cursoranysphereDetection & mitigation playbook
Vendor / applianceDetect
Inventory every anysphere cursor deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.
Fix
Apply the anysphere cursor security patch or hotfix for CVE-2026-50549 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.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-50549 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.