Loading story…
A critical vulnerability in the Axios HTTP client library, tracked as CVE-2026-40175, allows attackers to turn polluted JavaScript object properties into malicious HTTP headers and abuse outbound requests for SSRF, request smuggling, and potential remote code execution. Researchers said the flaw stems from improper header handling in Axios’s HTTP adapter and unsafe config merging, which can let Object.prototype values containing CRLF characters be injected into requests. The issue can be chained with prototype pollution in other npm packages to target internal services, including the AWS EC2 metadata endpoint at 169.254.169.254, potentially bypassing IMDSv2 and exposing cloud credentials or broader infrastructure.
A public proof-of-concept was released alongside disclosure, raising urgency for defenders even though active exploitation had not been confirmed at the time of reporting. The flaw affects Axios versions before 1.13.2, while maintainers said 1.15.0 introduces strict header validation that blocks CRLF-based header injection; organizations were urged to upgrade and audit dependencies such as body-parser, qs, and minimist for prototype pollution paths. One report cited internet-wide estimates of more than 48,000 potentially exposed instances, underscoring the risk of unauthorized internal access and possible full cloud compromise.
Mallory correlates global threat intelligence with your attack surface — know if you’re exposed before adversaries strike.
4 events from the most recent confirmed update back to the earliest known activity.
Netlas estimated that over 48,000 instances may be directly exposed to the Axios vulnerability, though reporting said active exploitation had not yet been observed and real-world severity was still being evaluated.
A public proof-of-concept exploit for the Axios flaw was released by maintainer Jason Saayman shortly after disclosure, increasing urgency for defenders to patch and assess exposure.
Axios released version 1.15.0 to address the vulnerability by enforcing stricter header validation and rejecting headers containing CRLF characters. The issue affects versions prior to 1.13.2, and reporting recommends upgrading to the fixed release.
A critical flaw in the Axios HTTP client, tracked as CVE-2026-40175, was publicly disclosed as enabling request smuggling, SSRF abuse, AWS IMDSv2 bypass, and possible remote code execution or broader cloud compromise when chained with prototype pollution.
Vulnerabilities, threat actors, malware, products, organizations, and breaches Mallory has linked to this story.
4 references tracked. Mallory keeps watching after this page renders.
cyberpress.org
Open sourcethestack.technology
Open sourcecvereports.com
Open sourcegithub.com
Open sourceMap indicators from this story to your assets and identify affected systems in minutes.
Every observed campaign, victim, and pivot linked to actors named in this story.
Malware, exploits, and IOCs connected to the activity described here.
YARA, Sigma, and Snort rules deployed to your SIEM as soon as they’re published.
Get matching new stories delivered to your team as they break — not the next morning.
Ask questions about this story and take action on the answers.
Other stories Mallory is tracking that overlap on entities, sources, or topic labels.
Axios patched several high-severity vulnerabilities affecting its Node.js HTTP adapter, including **CVE-2026-40175**, a critical flaw in versions below `1.13.2` that Singapore's CSA said could enable unauthenticated **SSRF**, potential remote code execution, and full cloud compromise. Separate disclosures also detailed **CVE-2026-42264**, which affects Axios `1.0.0` through `1.15.1` and allows attacker-controlled values inherited from a polluted `Object.prototype` to alter request behavior, enabling credential injection, request redirection, SSRF to Unix sockets, arbitrary code execution during redirects, and weaker HTTP parsing. Axios fixed that issue in `1.15.2` after merging hardening changes into the main branch. A later advisory described **CVE-2026-44494**, another prototype-pollution gadget in Axios's handling of `config.proxy` that affects versions from `1.0.0` up to but not including `1.16.0`, with the `0.x` branch also tracked as affected below `0.32.0`. If an application already contains a separate prototype-pollution source, the flaw can silently route outbound Axios traffic through an attacker-controlled proxy, exposing **Authorization headers, cookies, and request bodies** while allowing forged responses and full man-in-the-middle interception. Axios addressed the issue in `1.16.0`, and a backport commit for the `0.x` line added null-prototype object merging and other hardening measures to reduce prototype-pollution risk.
Jul 10, 2026
Axios released fixes for two newly disclosed vulnerabilities, **CVE-2026-44492** and **CVE-2026-44494**, affecting its widely used HTTP client for Node.js. The first bug stems from improper normalization of IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses in `shouldBypassProxy`, allowing crafted URLs to evade local proxy exclusion logic and potentially reach sensitive targets such as cloud instance metadata services. The second issue is a prototype pollution gadget in Axios’s backend file adapter that can turn existing `Object.prototype` pollution elsewhere in an application into a man-in-the-middle condition on outbound HTTP requests, exposing or altering traffic and potentially leaking cleartext authentication cookies. Maintainers urged users to upgrade to **Axios 1.16.0** or **0.32.0**. The fixes follow earlier Axios proxy-handling problems, including **CVE-2026-42043**, which bypassed a prior SSRF-related patch by exploiting Axios’s incomplete loopback validation. Researchers showed that Axios treated only `localhost`, `127.0.0.1`, and `::1` as loopback, even though the full `127.0.0.0/8` range is reserved for loopback under RFC 1122, allowing addresses such as `127.0.0.2` to be forwarded through attacker-controlled proxies. That flaw, which could expose internal services, admin interfaces, Docker-bound endpoints, and cloud credential services, was previously fixed in **Axios 1.15.1** and **0.31.1**, underscoring continuing security concerns around proxy bypass and request-handling logic in the library.
Jun 29, 2026
Attackers hijacked the npm account of Axios maintainer Jason Saayman and published malicious `axios@1.14.1` and `axios@0.30.4`, bypassing the project’s normal GitHub Actions OIDC publishing flow and adding the staged dependency `plain-crypto-js@4.2.1`. That package’s `postinstall` logic fetched platform-specific payloads from `sfrclak[.]com:8000`, deploying a remote access trojan on Windows, macOS, and Linux while deleting installer artifacts and restoring benign-looking package metadata to hinder detection. The poisoned releases were available for roughly three hours before removal, but Axios’s massive downstream use meant developer workstations, CI/CD pipelines, ephemeral builds, and transitive dependencies could all have resolved the malicious versions during the exposure window. Researchers and vendors including Socket, StepSecurity, Elastic, Huntress, Microsoft, Google Threat Intelligence Group, and others said affected systems should be treated as fully compromised because the malware enabled reconnaissance, command execution, persistence on Windows, payload retrieval, and likely credential theft. Multiple reports tied the operation to a North Korea-linked actor—most prominently `UNC1069`, with other vendors using names such as Sapphire Sleet and STARDUST CHOLLIMA—while Axios later confirmed the maintainer had been compromised through a targeted social-engineering campaign involving fake corporate outreach and a bogus meeting workflow. Organizations were urged to roll back to safe versions such as `1.14.0` or `0.30.3`, remove `plain-crypto-js`, rebuild impacted hosts, rotate all accessible secrets, review lockfiles and CI logs, and block traffic to the identified command-and-control infrastructure.
Jul 23, 2026