Alarm bells ratcheted up yet again about an AI-discovered vulnerability that could — if exploited in the wild — destabilize vast stretches of the internet. 

The critical defect — CVE-2026-111497 — affects the Google-developed Brotli decompression library that’s bundled into many components, applications and cloud services riding on open-source software. The buffer overflow vulnerability, which OpenAI Codex Security discovered and Node.js disclosed in a Oct. 21 security advisory, can trigger system crashes and remote code execution. 

Researchers haven’t observed any active exploitation of the defect in real networks, but concerns are mounting. Multiple vendors and software packages, including Microsoft and Python, that rely on vulnerable versions of Brotli have rushed emergency patches out to address the risk of exploitation in their respective systems.

Wiz researchers warned that “91% of cloud environments have resources vulnerable to CVE-2026-111497 and 82% of cloud environments have publicly exposed Node.js instances.”

The attack surface is “extremely broad and vast, but much of the impact of exploitation depends entirely on its implementation and how it is used within that piece of software,” said Jake Knott, head of threat intelligence at watchTowr.

Christiaan Beek, vice president at Rapid7 Intelligence, said the Brotli vulnerability is especially concerning because it’s effectively hiding out in the open, as are many open-source software libraries.

“Most businesses have no idea how deeply components like Brotli are embedded in their technology. A vulnerability in a compression library sounds almost boring until you realize it could affect applications your business depends on every day,” he said. “That’s the uncomfortable reality of modern software: a small component can create a very large business risk.”

The defect, dubbed “Node2Shell” or “Broccoli2Shell,” is the latest in a series of vulnerabilities that have provoked an emergency response. Defenders and researchers were on heightened alert last week over a pair of critical PHP vulnerabilities dubbed “PHP2Shell” that also have yet to be exploited in the wild as of Monday afternoon.

These cyclical and increasingly recurring so-called emergencies are putting organizations and defenders at a significant disadvantage. 

“After being part of numerous channels and message threads full of defenders trying to discern what’s real and what’s BS over the past several months — and especially the past week — I can say unequivocally that the human cost of these events is real, pronounced, and will have downstream impacts far beyond what the community can immediately predict,” Caitlin Condon, vice president of research at VulnCheck, told CyberScoop.

“None of this — high-profile vulnerability disclosures, the overblown exploitability assumptions, the community arguments, the race to weaponize — is new,” she added. 

“What’s changed now is that AI is pumping out complex — and often not clearly explained — finds at a much higher rate, exponentially increasing noise levels and making it much more difficult both to debunk overhyped vulnerability discoveries and to determine which vulnerabilities are broadly exploitable in real-world production configurations.” 

Researchers acknowledge the additional stress defenders and organizations are in because of this always-in-emergency mode.

“We’ve reached a point where everything seems to be an emergency. And when everything is critical, businesses risk losing sight of what actually matters,” Beek said. “The real cost isn’t just patching. It’s the constant disruption to operations, the diversion of resources, and the difficult decisions about which business systems deserve immediate attention.”

Experts also consider this the new normal as more high-impact vulnerabilities with far-reaching potential consequences are found. 

“We suspect in the very near future, defenders may lose the ability to tell what is a true emergency versus a loud and prevalent vulnerability in a ubiquitous product or library,” Knott said. 

Experts advise organizations to focus on their specific risk, weighing the Brotli vulnerability’s potential impact in their environment. 

“Attackers don’t care about CVSS scores,” Beek said. “They care about what they can compromise, disrupt, or monetize and that’s exactly how we should prioritize our defenses.”

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The PHP project released patches Wednesday for two critical vulnerabilities in a programming language used in an extremely large portion of the internet.

The patch addresses two flaws, catalogued as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, both rated 9.2 on the CVSS v4.0 severity scale, which tops out at 10. Researchers describe them as remote code execution vulnerabilities, which could let an attacker run their own code on a server and potentially take control of it. 

The vulnerabilities have been dubbed “php2shell” by researchers. While the industry has spent the past 24 hours sounding the alarm over the vulnerabilities, there has been very little in terms of reported exploitation as of Wednesday afternoon.

In a release, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said it wasn’t aware of any exploitation.

“While CISA has not observed exploitation of these vulnerabilities as of the time of publication, they pose a risk to organizations if left unpatched,” the release reads.

Multiple researchers have told CyberScoop that they have observed very little activity outside of reconnaissance that is probing to see what vulnerable systems are still connected to the internet.

“We see clear evidence attackers are actively probing and performing reconnaissance across PHP applications,” Kelly Shortridge, chief product officer at Fastly, told CyberScoop. “The gap between disclosure and widespread, repeatable exploitation is typically hours to a few days for vulnerabilities of this severity and attack ROI.”

“We have not observed, or independently confirmed, successful in-the-wild exploitation of these vulnerabilities on live customer systems,” Jon Semon, principal security operations analyst at Huntress, told CyberScoop.

“We have checked across the Linux web servers we have visibility into for the post-exploitation behavior shown in the public proof of concept, such as a web server process spawning a shell that runs recon commands or writes a file into the web root, and did not find activity matching it.”

Neither the technical cause nor a complete list of affected versions has been officially confirmed, with the PHP team saying full details will be published with the release. An advisory from CERT-EU, the European Union’s computer emergency response team, says the flaws could affect every version of PHP from 5 onward. 

The security firm watchTowr said Tuesday the vulnerabilities had been set for release Thursday under embargo. The PHP team moved the release up a day and said it could act sooner still if details became public or exploitation appeared.

A video demonstrating an exploit chain spread online overnight via researcher Kirill Firsov, who shared it and credited researchers known as LCFR and Calif.io. watchTowr said it had reproduced one of the flaws. Code claiming to exploit the flaws is circulating but has not been verified, and security firms caution such code is sometimes laced with malware.

The potential exposure is broad. PHP runs between 70-80% of websites whose server-side language is known, according to market research, and underpins platforms including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and Laravel. Researchers estimated more than 1.3 million internet-exposed hosts could be vulnerable, and a Shodan search counted about 1.9 million. Among servers that disclose their version, most run branches are no longer receiving security updates: about 758,000 run versions from 5.4 through 8.1, compared with 272,000 on supported branches, according to VirusTotal.

CERT-EU and Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre advised organizations to prepare to update systems quickly and suggested isolating internet-facing applications where immediate patching was not feasible. PHP flaws have been exploited before: the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s known-exploited vulnerability catalog lists three in PHP itself, two used in ransomware campaigns.

The vulnerability was discovered by AI cybersecurity firm Calif, using OpenAI’s cybersecurity-focused AI model GPT-5.6 Sol. Wiz, an AI security firm purchased by Google in March, also independently discovered and reported the flaw, according to a blog posted by OpenAI on Wednesday.

The discovery sparked a two-month collaborative effort between OpenAI, PHP maintainers, researchers and security providers to develop a long-term technical fix and prepare for public disclosure.

OpenAI said the priority for all organizations relying on PHP is to apply the new patches, and offered a free tool and other support to help identify vulnerable versions.

“To our knowledge, frontier AI found these vulnerabilities before attackers did, opening a Defender’s Window for maintainers and security providers to prepare fixes and protections ahead of disclosure,” OpenAI wrote in an unsigned blog.

OpenAI also said the PHP flaw is among “several significant vulnerabilities we’ve already found and are working to fix, and we expect similar findings to increase sharply in the coming months.”

In a blog posted the same day, researchers at Wiz said they had discovered “multiple critical vulnerabilities” in PHP, all related to memory safety using GPT-5.6 Sol, their own Wiz Atlas AI tool and Google’s Gemini 4 Argon to conduct their research.

Perhaps most concerning: The bug existed for decades prior to the emergence of modern AI tools, but it’s so complex and technically arduous that few attackers were likely capable of exploiting it.

According to Wiz, it required developing exploits for “notoriously complex” memory bugs that work across different PHP versions, configurations and application behaviors. It would also have to account for differences in PHP deployments that could render the exploit harmless, and each change would require more testing, analysis and debugging.

In the era of AI hacking, “this is no longer a barrier,” the Wiz researchers said.

Large language models can adapt exploits to different PHP versions, configurations or memory layouts, use third-party testing and debugging tools, and carry out a series of other functions for “reducing the specialist effort required for each target.”

“This changes the economics of both discovery and exploitation,” wrote Wiz researchers Sagi Tzadik, Shir Tamari, Nir Ohfeld and Tomer Schwartz. “As AI reduces the effort needed to develop and adapt complex exploits, vulnerabilities that once seemed impractical to exploit become viable targets.”

More information is expected over the course of the day. The PHP team is to publish the full advisory with the release, and security firms including Huntress and Tenable said they would update their analyses as technical details and proof-of-concept code emerge.

UPDATE: 10/21/2026, 3:00 p.m. ET: This article was updated to include infromation from CISA and from industry researchers.

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Ivanti customers are in familiar territory, responding to yet another actively exploited zero-day affecting one of the vendor’s most commonly targeted security products. 

Volexity researchers, which discovered in-the-wild exploitation earlier this month, said attackers actually exploited three zero-days in a chain that allowed them to bypass authentication, execute code remotely and escalate privileges. 

Ivanti disclosed and issued a patch for the authentication bypass and remote-code execution components of the exploit chain as a single vulnerability in Ivanti Connect Secure. The company said it initially discovered a portion of the high-severity vulnerability — CVE-2026-104935 — during internal security checks in June.

A threat actor, which Volexity tracks as UTA0576, exploited the defects before Ivanti addressed them and issued a patch.

“Because the issue was discovered internally, was not being actively exploited, and did not meet the threshold for an out-of-band release, a fix was scheduled for inclusion in our normal product release cycle,” an Ivanti spokesperson wrote in response to questions.

“Successful exploitation requires chaining multiple vulnerabilities and Ivanti has fully addressed the unauthenticated remote code execution component of that chain, eliminating the primary exploitation path,” the spokesperson added. “We are also developing additional updates to address the remaining vulnerability and further strengthen product security.”

The full scope of compromise remains under investigation. The company, in a security advisory, said a “limited number of customers” were already compromised prior to disclosure. 

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added the defect to its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog Tuesday.

Sean Koessel, vice president of professional services at Volexity, said the earliest confirmed instance of exploitation occurred Oct. 1. Yet, “it wouldn’t surprise us if there was activity toward the end of September,” he added.

Volexity researchers observed a series of post-exploitation activities during an investigation involving a customer’s compromised Ivanti Connect Secure VPN appliance earlier this month. “UTA0576 repeatedly exploited these vulnerabilities to compromise the ICS VPN appliance and run commands on it,” the company wrote in a blog post. 

The threat actor extracted credentials stored on the device, dumped and stole Active Directory metadata, and deployed multiple custom and malicious tools capable of facilitating follow-on attacks, credential testing and hunting for administrator passwords, recovery keys and other passwords.

“Based on Volexity’s observations, UTA0576 primarily focused on credential theft, data exfiltration, log tampering, and network reconnaissance,” the company added.

Ivanti encouraged potentially vulnerable customers to act immediately by upgrading to the latest version of software, running the company’s Integrity Checker Tool regularly, and reviewing indicators of compromise published by Volexity.

CISA also urged Ivanti customers to patch the vulnerability quickly, as it dissuaded customers from relying on the company’s Integrity Checker Tool.

“Organizations seeking to determine whether they were compromised will need to conduct network and memory forensics to identify evidence of exploitation,” the agency said in an alert Tuesday. “Ivanti’s Integrity Checker Tool may not detect evidence of exploitation of CVE-2026-104935 because threat actor commands execute in memory.”

Ivanti products, including Ivanti Connect Secure, are a frequent target for attackers of various motivations in the network edge space. 

CISA has flagged 36 Ivanti defects on its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog since late 2021. At least 6 defects across Ivanti products have been exploited since late January.

“Edge devices are a valuable initial foothold and often enable attackers to pivot further into targeted networks,” Koessel said. “It would be fair to expect widespread exploitation, this is a common theme with most vulnerabilities in edge devices.”

Other researchers also expect exploitation to pick up rapidly. 

“Given the history of attacker attention and focus Ivanti Connect Secure has previously drawn — and the trivial nature of the authentication bypass — widespread, indiscriminate exploitation is inevitable as attackers begin reviewing patches and public information,” said Yordan Ganchev, principal threat intelligence specialist at watchTowr.

“The race condition required for code execution offers little resistance, as an unauthenticated attacker can repeatedly attempt exploitation until it succeeds,” he added.

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Citrix customers just got through back-to-back weekends filled with varying levels of uncertainty and worry, as yet another actively exploited zero-day vulnerability was discovered in Citrix NetScaler products.

Researchers and security experts said the vulnerability — CVE-2026-88779 — is less concerning because exploitation triggers denial of service and only impacts instances that have SAML (security assertion markup language) enabled. 

“This means it doesn’t work out of the box against every NetScaler deployment,” Jake Knott, head of threat intelligence at watchTowr, told CyberScoop. “While this is very inconvenient, it doesn’t have organizations scrambling to trigger incident response.”

Citrix was much quicker and consistent in alerting customers to the emerging threat Friday, and followed up the next day with a more detailed blog post and security advisory that contained a patch for the high-severity defect. 

“After we were alerted to this issue we immediately developed and published a mitigation while concurrently developing, testing and deploying a fix,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “The fix for this issue is available, and we urge all customers to quickly apply it to their NetScaler instance.”

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added the defect to its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog Sunday.

The vendor’s response also provided some relief for customers and researchers who spent much of the previous weekend rushing to assess widespread rumors of other defects in the assailed network edge gateways. In that case, Citrix took most of the weekend to confirm attackers were actively exploiting a pair of NetScaler zero-days, some of which researchers said remained undetected for at least three weeks.

“Citrix did a better job with their response to this vulnerability,” and took steps that enabled customers to make their own risk-based decisions with more currently available information, said Joe Toomey, vice president of underwriting security at insurance provider Coalition. 

“Although it’s difficult to celebrate given this is the third publicly-exploited NetScaler zero-day vulnerability in a two-week window, it is a step in the right direction,” he added. 

Citrix declined to say how many customers are impacted by the latest zero-day or when the first instance of exploitation occurred. Yet, Knott at watchTowr said exploitation likely began Friday. 

The newer defect doesn’t share any technical links with the pair of zero-days Citrix disclosed less than a week prior, but it can accelerate one of those vulnerabilities — CVE-2026-88771 — by intentionally crashing machines to speed up exploitation, Knott said.

While risk is currently perceived low for CVE-2026-88779, it is “incredibly simple to trigger, with a single specially crafted request being all that is needed to knock an appliance offline,” Knott added. “Exploitation is already occurring in the wild, and disrupting an authentication gateway can prevent legitimate users from accessing the services behind it.”

Toomey also described the denial-of-service vulnerability as less serious than the previous week’s actively exploited zero-days. Yet, he noted, exploitation attempts of CVE-2026-88779 “clearly contain shellcode that implies that the threat actor believes they can use this vulnerability, or chain it with another vulnerability, in order to achieve remote-code execution.”

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Attackers remained undetected for more than three weeks as they exploited a critical zero-day vulnerability affecting Citrix NetScaler appliances en masse. 

The earliest known instance of CVE-2026-88772 exploitation occurred Sept. 3, Mandiant researchers told CyberScoop Tuesday. 

The besieged security vendor and researchers didn’t confirm the attacks until late last week. By then, Mandiant says, organizations in North America and Europe spanning the government, financial services, education, telecom, legal and professional services sectors were already likely compromised.

“We are aware of dozens of impacted organizations,” Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer at Mandiant Consulting, wrote in a LinkedIn post. He attributed the attacks to “advanced and suspected state-sponsored threat actors.”

The three-week gap — at minimum — between initial exploitation and confirmed in-the-wild attacks gave attackers a significant advantage. 

Mandiant warned that the gap could be even wider. “We are still responding to active intrusions, and new evidence may change our understanding of the campaign timeline,” researchers who published a threat intelligence report on the attacks Tuesday told CyberScoop in an email. 

The incident response firm’s analysis on the latest zero-day attack spree targeting Citrix customers underscores the multi-layered mess network defenders have been responding to since Saturday.

The zero-day exploits in Mandiant’s report only cover half of the problem. Attackers have also exploited a second Citrix NetScaler zero-day — CVE-2026-88771 — since at least Sept. 24, according to GreyNoise, but researchers said that campaign likely started earlier as well.

It’s unclear to what extent the pair of zero-days are linked. But, nearly two days after the first unconfirmed rumors of the attacks surfaced, Citrix disclosed both of the actively exploited defects in a security advisory Sunday, releasing patches for them and six additional vulnerabilities.

Mandiant researchers uncovered multiple novel tools and tactics attackers used to exploit CVE-2026-88772, gain privileged access to compromised environments, hop around the network and steal sensitive data. A threat actor in one observed intrusion routed traffic through novel tunneler malware to “manually conduct internal reconnaissance and credential theft,” researchers wrote. 

Researchers at watchTowr also published technical analysis of CVE-2026-88782 Tuesday.

The attacks from multiple fronts, involving two zero-days, reflect an alarming and sustained pattern of malicious activity targeting so-called edge devices, such as virtual private network gateways and firewalls. 

Vulnerabilities in these devices accounted for 48% of the enterprise-related zero-days last year, according to Google Threat Intelligence Group.

“Our previous research corroborates that both cyber espionage and financially motivated threat actors prioritize exploiting vulnerabilities in edge devices and security appliances,” Mandiant researchers wrote in response to questions on their report. 

“Because most edge devices do not support endpoint detection and response (EDR) monitoring, targeting them, particularly through exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities, provides threat actors with an infection vector that is difficult to detect and prevent, and the opportunity to scale a campaign as long as the exploit remains undiscovered,” the researchers added. 

Carmakal, in his LinkedIn post, warned that Mandiant expects “broad and opportunistic exploitation” of both of the Citrix NetScaler zero-days by a variety of threat actors in the near term.

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Citrix took most of the weekend to confirm that attackers were actively exploiting the newest round of NetScaler zero-days, leaving network defenders and threat hunters to react without official confirmation. 

Yet, behind the scenes, multiple CERTs, advisory firms, insurance providers, researchers and chatty security professionals warned their respective peers and communities of a live and serious threat. 

Nearly two days after the first unconfirmed rumors, Citrix published a security advisory Sunday disclosing the exploited zero-days, CVE-2026-88771 and CVE-2026-88772, releasing patches for them and six additional defects.

By then, criticism was at a fever pitch, and for some NetScaler customers the warning came too late. 

“The information vacuum was most striking. Customers were receiving warnings through unofficial channels while Citrix remained publicly silent,” Ben Harris, founder and CEO at watchTowr, told CyberScoop. 

“Customers were left without communication, guidance, or even acknowledgement that the vulnerability that was rumored to exist was real. Citrix could have warned customers that active exploitation was occurring and provided immediate defensive guidance without disclosing technical details that would help attackers,” he added. 

“When active exploitation is underway, hours matter,” Harris said.

Citrix did not directly answer questions about the lengthy communication delay. 

“We recently identified critical vulnerabilities in Citrix NetScaler ADC and Citrix NetScaler Gateway that led us to immediately develop and release a new version of the software that addresses the issues,” the company said in a prepared statement.

The critical defects are both rated 9.5 on the CVSS scale and allow attackers to achieve remote code execution. 

Researchers are particularly concerned about CVE-2026-88771, a command-injection vulnerability that affects all NetScaler appliances in a default configuration. That gives attackers a broad pool of targets and a better chance at successful exploitation. A proof-of-concept exploit for the vulnerability is also publicly available. 

Palo Alto Networks said it identified more than 50,000 publicly exposed instances of Citrix NetScaler devices potentially vulnerable to both of the zero-days as of Sunday. 

The earliest known exploitation attempt occurred Sept. 24 when GreyNoise said it observed an unsuccessful exploitation attempt against a Citrix NetScaler Gateway under its control for malicious activity scanning purposes. But researchers warn that exploitation likely started before then.

Citrix did not say how many customers have been compromised thus far and researchers are still assessing the fallout.

Citrix said it is making generic indicators of compromise available to customers in their user consoles, and the company referred to previously issued guidance for customers who suspect compromise. 

Attribution for the attacks is also still under investigation, yet NetScaler products are a common, recurring target for financially-motivated cybercriminals and state-sponsored espionage groups. 

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued an alert Sunday after Citrix publicly confirmed the attacks on its customers, and added CVE-2026-88771 and CVE-2026-88772 to its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog. The vendor has appeared on the agency’s list of vulnerabilities known to be exploited five times this year, and a total of 26 times since late 2021.

Security leaders across the industry — including Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer at Mandiant Consulting, and Wendi Whitmore, chief security intelligence officer at Palo Alto Networks — also sprung into action Sunday, with direct warnings on LinkedIn about the urgent threat. 

The information vacuum that persisted through most of the weekend put cybersecurity professionals in sometimes unique positions. Joe Toomey, vice president of underwriting security at insurance provider Coalition, said the company notified potentially vulnerable customers with limited official data and no confirmation from CISA or Citrix.

In a LinkedIn post Sunday, he called Citrix “unconscionably irresponsible” for remaining silent for more than 36 hours after word began circulating about in-the-wild exploitation.

“I fully understand a vendor embargoing specific details about a vulnerability when a patch has not yet been published, but once the vuln is exploited in the wild, some of those rules no longer apply,” Toomey wrote.

Citrix and its customers are in familiar territory. The vendor’s products have been widely targeted in previous attack sprees, often involving zero-day exploits and some infamously referred to as CitrixBleed and CitrixBleed 2.

“Citrix has a history of delaying the publication of vulnerabilities, even when they’re being exploited in the wild and affecting customers. Citrix eventually released patches and an advisory, but an adequate response also requires timely, clear communication,” Harris said. 

“Customers shouldn’t have to rely on unofficial warnings, security researchers, and third parties to learn that critical infrastructure may already be compromised,” he added. “This latest incident raises serious questions about whether Citrix has learned from previous crises and meaningfully improved how it protects and informs customers.”

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GitLab released emergency patches Thursday for two high-severity flaws in its software development platform, one of them holding the highest possible severity score, while a security firm reports that it has already seen attackers probing the internet for the flaws.

The company patched the issues in new versions of both its Community Edition and Enterprise Edition, and urged those that use self-managed installations to upgrade as soon as possible. GitLab said its own hosted service already runs the fixed code, and that customers of its single-tenant Dedicated offering are not impacted.

The more serious of the two flaws, tracked as CVE-2026-85706, sits in the interface that handles repository commits. GitLab said that under certain conditions an attacker could read any file on the server, because the code failed to confine file paths properly and did not enforce authentication. An attacker does not need an account nor credentials to take advantage of the flaw.

The vulnerability affects every release from 18.7 up to 19.1.8, along with the 19.2 and 19.3 lines before this week’s patches. GitLab assigned it a CVSS score of 10.0, the top of the scale used across the industry.

The second flaw, CVE-2026-87719, affects only GitLab’s Enterprise Edition. The company says a logged-in user with Duo Chat access could hide a command inside an ordinary request, prompting the server to look up its own settings for the software’s Advanced Search feature, which would return the settings and passwords being held. It affects releases from 18.3 onward and carries a CVSS score of 9.9. 

WatchTowr Labs wrote in a LinkedIn post Friday that it was already watching probes against the path traversal flaw, which it said an attacker can trigger in one HTTP request. The firm said organizations running self-hosted GitLab servers reachable from the open internet face the greatest risk, and pointed defenders toward their logs, suggesting they look for POST requests to addresses under /api/v4/projects/{id}/repository/commits/ that carry a file.path parameter. 

Drawing on earlier GitLab flaws, the firm said broad, untargeted attacks tend to follow soon after a patch appears.

“Based on recent GitLab vulnerabilities, we know the time until indiscriminate exploitation is likely not far away,” the post read. 

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added the vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) list on Friday afternoon. 

You can find more information about the vulnerabilities on GitLab’s website. 

Update: Sept. 11, 2026; 4:30 p.m.: This story has been updated to reflect the vulnerability being added to CISA’s KEV list.

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SonicWall customers are grappling with yet another pair of actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in SonicWall SMA 1000 appliances, a product that’s been besieged with recurring defects and attacks over the past nine months. 

The vendor disclosed and released patches for the defects — CVE-2026-83548 and CVE-2026-83549 — and noted both were already actively exploited in the wild in a security advisory Tuesday. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added the defects to its known exploited vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog Wednesday. 

SonicWall customers have confronted a barrage of actively exploited vulnerabilities in SonicWall devices for years. Attackers have consistently exploited newly discovered zero-days and years-old defects in the vendor’s products to break into victim environments.

Rapid7 researchers said the new zero-days — a max-severity pre-authentication server-side request forgery vulnerability and a high-severity OS command injection vulnerability — can be chained together to achieve unauthenticated remote-code execution. 

SonicWall did not say how many customers have been directly impacted by active exploitation or when the first known instance of exploitation occurred. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

“Please stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Another appliance sitting at the edge of the network, another pair of vulnerabilities chained together, and another unauthenticated path to complete compromise,” Jake Knott, head of threat intelligence at watchTowr, said in an email. 

“SonicWall says these vulnerabilities were internally discovered, while also saying it investigated a case indicating active exploitation. Please pick one, or, at minimum, explain how both are true,” Knott added. “Those statements may be technically accurate, but without that context, the disclosure leaves defenders guessing about when and how the vulnerabilities were actually identified.”

The vendor’s security advisory did not include indicators of compromise. It urged customers to contact tech support for assistance in reviewing IOCs and hunting for potential signs of compromise, and if detected, to reimage or redeploy the appliance, change all user and administrator passwords and reset tokens. 

SonicWall did not attribute the known exploits to a specific threat group or describe the attacker’s motivations.

The freshly disclosed pair of vulnerabilities are the latest in a series of security issues confronting the vendor’s customers, including actively exploited zero-days, previously disclosed defects, and an attack last year that allowed a state-sponsored threat group to steal the firewall configurations of every SonicWall customer. 

In late July, Huntress researchers spotted an attack spree that compromised 30 SonicWall customers in less than two days. Earlier that month, the company acknowledged another pair of zero-days that were exploited for three weeks before the vendor disclosed and patched the defects.

Ransomware groups, including INC ransomware and Akira, have taken a special interest in SonicWall. Ten of the 19 SonicWall defects added to CISA’s KEV catalog since late 2021 are known to be used in ransomware campaigns.

The five defects added to CISA’s KEV most recently, since just mid-December 2025, all impact SonicWall SMA 1000 appliances.

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SonicWall customers are attempting to dodge another security challenge as attackers are exploiting a pair of zero-day vulnerabilities that have been confirmed by the vendor. 

The company publicly disclosed the vulnerabilities — CVE-2026-15409 and CVE-2026-15410 — in a security advisory Tuesday. SonicWall credited an employee with discovering the defects, but it hasn’t said when the discovery occurred or the earliest known instance of exploitation. 

Rapid7 researchers told CyberScoop both vulnerabilities were first exploited June 22. “From the cases that our team has observed, the goal is likely ransomware, though we have prevented the actors from achieving exfiltration and encryption,” said Seth Lazarus, senior manager of detection and response services at Rapid7.

Overlapping tactics, techniques and procedures from the attacks observed by Rapid7 indicate the same threat group or attacker discovered and exploited the zero-days, Lazarus added.

SonicWall did not answer questions about the impacts of these attacks thus far, and the company hasn’t attributed the attacks to a known group or described the attacker’s origins and motivations.

The vendor did, however, confirm to CyberScoop that both vulnerabilities have been chained together for exploitation. The vulnerabilities affecting SonicWall SMA1000 appliances, including a max-severity defect that allows attackers to make authenticated requests and a 7.2-rated vulnerability that allows authenticated command injection.

“When these two are chained, an attacker can go from zero access to a complete system compromise for the affected appliance,” said Landon Rice, senior exploit developer at VulnCheck.

Ben Harris, founder and CEO at watchTowr, said two characteristics of the vulnerabilities fuel a sense of dread. “Both were exploited as zero-days before fixes were available, and together they offer a plausible path to remote-code execution from the internet,” he said.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added both zero-days to its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog Tuesday. 

SonicWall encouraged customers to patch the vulnerabilities by upgrading to the latest software version, which it released upon disclosure, and shared some indicators of compromise to help customers hunt for potential malicious activity on their systems.

“Speed of response was a priority for us,” said Bret Fitzgerald, senior director of global communications at SonicWall. “Within days of becoming aware of the issue, our team had developed a script that we can run on behalf of affected customers to assist with resolution, and mitigation efforts are already underway.”

SonicWall and third-party researchers haven’t said how many SonicWall customers are impacted by the exploited vulnerabilities, but the vendor did say it already investigated multiple cases of active exploitation. 

Fitzgerald said the company monitors about one million sensors globally and “SMA1000 appliances represent a very small subset of that footprint, less than 5,000 units.”

SonicWall said support staff are also helping customers work through instances of suspicious activity, warning that patching alone is not sufficient. 

The vendor and its customers have been hit by a barrage of actively exploited zero-days and previously disclosed defects in SonicWall devices for years. In 2025, an undisclosed state-sponsored threat actor intruded the company’s cloud environment and stole firewall configurations of every SonicWall customer. 

Seventeen defects affecting the vendor’s products have been added to CISA’s known exploited vulnerabilities catalog since late 2021. Ten of those defects are known to be used in ransomware campaigns, according to CISA, including a wave of about 40 Akira ransomware attacks between mid-July and early August.

“As always,” Harris said, “when something is confirmed as already exploited in the wild, patching is the bare minimum, and breach should be assumed.”

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