Red Hat Automatic Bug Reporting Tool: privilege escalation flaw under attack

What is affected

Red Hat Automatic Bug Reporting Tool is mostly run by companies, schools and public bodies, not on home computers. You are unlikely to have it yourself, but organisations that hold your data may. Breaches that start with flaws like this one are how personal data ends up leaked.

Red Hat Automatic Bug Reporting Tool (ABRT) contains a privilege escalation vulnerability that could allow local users with certain permissions to gain privileges via a symlink attack on a file with a predictable name. The impacted product(s) could be end-of-life (EoL) and/or end-of-service (EoS). Users are advised to discontinue use and/or transition to a supported version.

What an attacker can do

This is a privilege escalation flaw. It lets an attacker turn limited access into full administrator control. Attackers pair it with another flaw or a malicious file: once anything of theirs runs on the device, this bug lets it take over completely.

How it is reached

Needs access to the device or a file opened on it

Access the attacker needs

A basic user account

Does the victim have to do something?

No, works without the victim doing anything

What to do

1. At home: nothing to install. Keep your own devices updated and use a different password for every service, so that a breach at one organisation does not open your other accounts.
2. If you administer Red Hat Automatic Bug Reporting Tool at work: apply the vendor's fix or mitigation now and review logs for signs of compromise, because the flaw was being exploited before it was listed.
3. If the product is past its support date and no fix exists, take it off the internet or retire it.

Apply mitigations in accordance with vendor instructions, ensuring compliance with CISA’s BOD 26-04 Prioritizing Security Updates Based on Risk (see URL in Notes) guidance and CISA’s “Forensics Triage Requirements” (see URL in Notes). Follow applicable BOD 26-04 guidance for cloud services or discontinue use of the product if mitigations are unavailable. Stakeholders are responsible for evaluating each asset's internet exposure and ensuring adherence to BOD 26-04 patching guidelines.

Vendor advisories and fixes

• github.comgithub.com/abrt/abrt/commit/3c1b60cfa62d39e5fff5a53a5bc53dae189e740e

How urgent is it

CISA added this vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogue on August 26, 2026, which means there is reliable evidence of attacks in the wild. US federal agencies must fix it by September 9, 2026, a deadline that has already passed. That deadline does not bind anyone else, but it shows how seriously the agency rates it.

The EPSS model estimates a 5.0% probability that this flaw will be exploited somewhere in the next 30 days. That is higher than 92% of all scored vulnerabilities.

Its CVSS severity score is 7.8 out of 10 (high), as recorded in the US National Vulnerability Database.

Technical description

The abrt-hook-ccpp help program in Automatic Bug Reporting Tool (ABRT) before 2.7.1 allows local users with certain permissions to gain privileges via a symlink attack on a file with a predictable name, as demonstrated by /var/tmp/abrt/abrt-hax-coredump or /var/spool/abrt/abrt-hax-coredump.