CVE-2026-76461 — Asyncos
CRITICALCVE-2026-76461 is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.8) SQL Injection vulnerability in cisco asyncos. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2026-09-14) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. A fix is available — see the affected versions and patch details below.
A vulnerability in the email parsing of Cisco AsyncOS Software for Cisco Secure Email Gateway could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary commands with root…
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2026-09-14. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2026-09-17.
- 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-2026-76461.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2026-76461 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 383,485 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the 10–50% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
A vulnerability in the email parsing of Cisco AsyncOS Software for Cisco Secure Email Gateway could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges on the underlying operating system.
This vulnerability is due to insufficient validation in the email parsing logic. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted email message that contains malicious SQL statements through an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary SQL statements, leading to command execution with root privileges on the underlying operating system.
Affected Products
asyncosciscoDetection & mitigation playbook
Vendor / applianceDetect
Inventory every cisco asyncos deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.
Fix
Apply the cisco asyncos security patch or hotfix for CVE-2026-76461 on the affected version, following the vendor advisory for your exact build.
Workarounds
Until you can upgrade, make sure every query built from user input uses parameterised statements or a prepared-statement API rather than string concatenation, and reduce the database account's privileges so an injected query cannot read or alter data beyond what the feature needs. Alongside that, restrict the management interface to trusted networks and apply the vendor's recommended configuration mitigations.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-76461 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.