Quantum Secular Labs / Blog / Advisories

CVE-2026-102490: Zammad GmbH Zammad Improper Privilege Management Vulnerability

CVE-2026-102490 is rated critical with a CVSS v4.0 base score of 9.4 and affects Zammad GmbH Zammad. Per its scoring, it can be exploited over the network, without authentication. The scored impact on confidentiality, integrity and availability is the highest available. CISA added it to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2026-10-02, which means exploitation in the wild has been observed.

Vulnerability description

Zammad packages built with packager.io (DEB and RPM) could have allowed a local attacker who already had file system write privileges as the unprivileged zammad service account to escalate to full root privileges on the host. Service processes began running as root and executed files that were owned and writable by the zammad account before dropping their identity to that account. An attacker holding that foothold could have escalated within seconds, because the affected services were restarted automatically whenever they stopped; no administrator interaction was required. Only installations from the DEB and RPM packages were affected — installations from source or the official container images were not. All released packaged versions were affected.

Severity breakdown

CVSS v4.0 9.4: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:P/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:H/SI:H/SA:H/E:A/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:Y/R:X/V:C/RE:X/U:X

  • Attack vector: Network. Exploitable remotely over the network.
  • Attack complexity: Low. No special conditions; the attack can be repeated reliably.
  • Attack requirements: None. No deployment or execution conditions are needed.
  • Privileges required: None. No account or prior access is needed.
  • User interaction: Passive. A user takes limited, routine action.
  • Confidentiality impact (vulnerable system): High. Total loss of confidentiality.
  • Integrity impact (vulnerable system): High. Total loss of integrity.
  • Availability impact (vulnerable system): High. Total loss of availability.
  • Confidentiality impact (subsequent systems): High. Total loss of confidentiality on other systems.
  • Integrity impact (subsequent systems): High. Total loss of integrity on other systems.
  • Availability impact (subsequent systems): High. Total loss of availability of other systems.

Underlying weakness

CWE-269: Improper Privilege Management

The product does not properly assign, modify, track, or check privileges for an actor, creating an unintended sphere of control for that actor.

Affected products

  • Zammad: before 7.2.2

References