Three Zero-Days Chained in Ivanti Connect Secure Grant Root Access Without Login
An attacker successfully chained three zero-day vulnerabilities in Ivanti Connect Secure to execute arbitrary commands as root without logging in. The targeted appliance was running the latest available version, 22.8R2.4, when exploitation started on 3 October.
Volexity, which detected the intrusion and reported the flaws to the vendor, tracks the responsible actor as UTA0576. The firm assessed with low confidence that the motivation was criminal rather than espionage. Ivanti confirmed on 13 October that it was aware of limited exploitation in the wild.
The first two vulnerabilities—an authentication bypass and a remote code execution flaw—were registered together under CVE-2026-104935 with a CVSS score of 8.6. When combined, they allow an attacker to run code as the cgi-server user on the appliance. A third vulnerability then provides local privilege escalation from that context to root.
At the time of disclosure the third flaw remained unpatched. Ivanti stated that a fix would be included in a future release expected within weeks. The CVE record lists all versions prior to 25.1.3.0 as affected, while 22.8R2.5, 25.1.3.0, 25.1.3.1, and 22.7R2.14 and earlier are listed as unaffected.
The Ivanti-recommended integrity checker did not detect the compromise because the exploit modifies library code only in memory and restores the original configuration data it alters. Confirming such an intrusion therefore requires both network and memory forensics expertise.
In the investigated case the attacker stole stored credentials, including LDAP domain credentials, searched for additional passwords in Active Directory, and performed password spraying. No backdoor or web shell was left on the system. CISA has classified the exploitation as active with total technical impact.
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