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A high-severity denial-of-service flaw tracked as CVE-2026-60109 affects Zeek versions earlier than 8.0.9, allowing an unauthenticated remote attacker to crash a sensor by sending a crafted Kerberos KRB_ERROR message to port 88 over UDP or TCP. The bug is a null pointer dereference in Zeek’s Kerberos protocol analyzer caused by a parser and analyzer state mismatch in proc_padata(), where an uninitialized pa_data_element can be dereferenced after the wrong parsing arm is selected.
Advisories say exploitation can be triggered with a single packet, including KRB_ERROR messages using error code 25 (KDC_ERR_PREAUTH_REQUIRED) and PA-DATA types 2, 3, 11, or 19. Zeek has released a fix in commit c82e3c734893d932e94310aec0dbeb1ffcea169d, which changes error handling to detect KRB_ERROR packets directly and avoid parsing error PA-DATA, while adding a regression test and PCAP reproducing the crash with embedded PA-ENC-TIMESTAMP data. Organizations running Zeek are advised to upgrade to 8.0.9 or later and apply vendor patches.
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Advisories disclosed CVE-2026-60109, a high-severity denial-of-service vulnerability affecting Zeek versions before 8.0.9. The flaw allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to crash a Zeek sensor with a single crafted UDP or TCP packet to port 88.
A Zeek source-code commit fixed a null-pointer dereference in the Kerberos analyzer triggered by crafted KRB_ERROR messages with PA-DATA. The change also added a regression test and PCAP reproducing the crash condition.
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Wireshark disclosed a high-severity flaw in its Kerberos protocol dissector that can crash **Wireshark** or **TShark** when processing malformed traffic or packet captures. The bug, tracked as `CVE-2026-76924` and documented in advisory `wnpa-sec-2026-78`, stems from an out-of-bounds read while formatting a preview of a learned `EncryptionKey` from plaintext Kerberos credential data. Researchers reported that a crafted `EncKrbCredPart`, including traffic delivered over UDP/88, could trigger a heap-buffer-overflow even without a valid keytab, valid key, or successful decryption. The vendor said the issue affects Wireshark versions **4.6.0 through 4.6.7** and **4.4.0 through 4.4.17**, and it has been fixed in **4.6.8** and **4.4.18**. The root cause was that the dissector copied bounded key bytes into retained storage but still read four bytes from the original input buffer, allowing one- to three-byte keys to cause the crash; the fix reformats the preview from a zero-initialized retained buffer after the bounded copy. Wireshark said malformed packets injected onto a network or malicious packet capture files could trigger the vulnerability, and no active exploits are known.
Aug 21, 2026
Wireshark disclosed **CVE-2026-6533**, a flaw in its dissection engine that can cause the application to crash or consume excessive CPU resources when processing malformed LZ77-compressed data. The issue was reported as an **SMB2 LZ77 decompression bomb** and can be triggered either by a crafted packet seen on the wire or by opening a malicious packet capture file, resulting in a denial-of-service condition for analysts using the tool. The vulnerability affects Wireshark versions **4.6.0 through 4.6.4** and **4.4.9 through 4.4.14**. Wireshark fixed the bug in versions **4.6.5** and **4.4.15**, and credited **Sharon Brizinov** with the discovery. The project said no active exploits were known at the time of disclosure, but organizations that rely on Wireshark for packet analysis should update affected installations to the patched releases.
Aug 21, 2026
Wireshark disclosed a vulnerability in its Tektronix K12xx/`.rf5` file parser that can crash the packet analyzer when a user opens a specially crafted capture file. The issue, tracked as **CVE-2026-76885** and **wnpa-sec-2026-71**, stems from incorrect handling of skipped 16-byte blobs in `get_record()`, which can inflate the reported record length and lead downstream functions such as `k12_read()`, `k12_seek_read()`, and `process_packet_data()` to read past a heap buffer boundary. The bug was reported by Jaime Cavero and reproduced with AddressSanitizer in both `tshark` and `capinfos` using a synthetic malicious `.rf5` sample. Wireshark said the flaw affects versions **4.6.0 through 4.6.7** and **4.4.0 through 4.4.17**, and was fixed in **4.6.8** and **4.4.18** through merged K12 buffer-overrun patches; the project said no active exploits are known, but warned that an attacker could trigger a denial of service by convincing a target to open a malformed capture file.
Aug 21, 2026