CVE-2026-24061

CRITICALCVSS 9.8Known Exploited

CISA Known Exploited Vulnerability

This vulnerability could affect an open-source component, third-party library, protocol, or proprietary implementation that could be used by different products. For more information, please see: https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/inetutils.git ; https://codeberg.org/inetutils/inetutils/commit/ccba9f748aa8d50a38d7748e2e60362edd6a32cc; https://codeberg.org/inetutils/inetutils/commit/fd702c02497b2f398e739e3119bed0b23dd7aa7b ; https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-24061

Remediation deadline: February 16, 2026

Description

GNU InetUtils contains an argument injection vulnerability in telnetd that could allow for remote authentication bypass via a "-f root" value for the USER environment variable.

Timeline

Published:January 21st, 2026 7:16 AM

Last modified:September 30th, 2026 11:47 AM

Added to KEV:January 26th, 2026

CVSS Scoring

CVSS v3: 9.8 (CRITICAL)

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Affected Software

From NVD CPE configuration data

Vendors

gnudebian

Products

inetutilsdebian_linux

Weaknesses (CWE)

CWE-88

References & Reports

Advisories, patches, and third-party reports

Source: NIST NVD · Data may lag official sources by up to one minute