CVE-2026-87874 — Red Hat
HIGHCVE-2026-87874 is a high-severity (CVSS 8.1) Deserialization of Untrusted Data vulnerability. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.
A flaw was found in the memcached cache plugin of the community.general Ansible collection. Although its documentation states that records are stored in JSON format, the plugin performs…
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- 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-2026-87874.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2026-87874 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 386,684 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
A flaw was found in the memcached cache plugin of the community.general Ansible collection. Although its documentation states that records are stored in JSON format, the plugin performs no explicit serialization and relies on python-memcached, which pickles values on write and unpickles them on read. Because memcached is unauthenticated and cache keys are predictable, an attacker able to reach a network-exposed or shared memcached instance can write a crafted pickle payload that is deserialized and executed on the Ansible controller when the poisoned fact cache is next read, leading to remote code execution.
Detection & 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-2026-87874 yet. Track the upstream advisory, and apply the exposure-reduction steps below in the meantime.
Mitigate without a patch
Do not deserialise data from untrusted sources: where the format allows it, restrict deserialisation to an explicit allowlist of expected types, and prefer a data-only format (JSON, Protobuf) over one that can reconstruct arbitrary objects until you can upgrade.
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 issue affects the community.general collection, which is community- maintained content and is not shipped in a Red Hat-supported execution environment for Ansible Automation Platform, nor in RHEL AppStream. Exploitation requires a non-default, insecure deployment (a reachable, unauthenticated memcached shared…
Bind memcached to localhost only (the plugin default, 127.0.0.1:11211) and never expose an unauthenticated memcached across a trust boundary; isolate the cache to the controller. Prefer the redis cache plugin (explicit JSON) or the jsonfile/yaml cache plugins where a shared/remote fact cache is required. Treat any host with write access to the fact-cache memcached as trusted to run code on the controller.Source: Red Hat security advisory for CVE-2026-87874 (CC BY 4.0)
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-87874 in your dependencies?
Find it across , including transitive dependencies.