Telnet
Nearly 800,000 Telnet servers exposed to remote attacks
Internet security watchdog Shadowserver tracks nearly 800,000 IP addresses with Telnet fingerprints amid ongoing attacks exploiting a critical authentication bypass vulnerability in the GNU InetUtils telnetd server. The security flaw (CVE-2026-24061) impacts GNU InetUtils versions 1.9.3 (released 11 years ago in 2015) through 2.7 and was patched in version 2.8 (released on January 20). “The […]
Hackers exploit critical telnetd auth bypass flaw to get root
A coordinated campaign has been observed targeting a recently disclosed critical-severity vulnerability that has been present in the GNU InetUtils telnetd server for 11 years. The security issue is tracked as CVE-2026-24061 and was reported on January 20. It is trivial to leverage and multiple exploit examples are publicly available. Bug persisted since 2015 Open-source contributor Simon Josefsson explains that the […]