Privilege Escalation in LiteSpeed User-End cPanel Plugin redisAble Function
CVE-2026-48172 is a critical privilege-escalation vulnerability in the LiteSpeed User-End cPanel Plugin affecting versions 2.3 through 2.4.4, and more generally versions before 2.4.5. The flaw is associated with incorrect privilege assignment and improper handling of the plugin’s Redis enable/disable functionality, exposed through the lsws.redisAble / redisAble JSON API path available to authenticated cPanel users. Reporting also describes the issue as involving a UNIX symlink following weakness in the Redis feature handling path. A low-privileged authenticated cPanel user, including a compromised shared-hosting tenant account or an attacker with FTP or web-shell access to such an account, can abuse this functionality to cause arbitrary scripts to execute with elevated privileges, potentially as root. The issue has been confirmed as actively exploited in the wild in May 2026.
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Impact, mitigation & remediation
What it means. What to do now. Patch path, mitigations, and the assume-compromise checklist.
Impact
What an attacker gets, and what they’ve been doing with it.
Mitigation
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Remediation
Patch, then assume compromise.
Exploits
No valid public exploits. Mallory filtered out 3 candidates as fakes, detection scripts, or README-only repos.
All candidate exploits were filtered out by Mallory's validation.
Affected products & vendors
Products and vendors Mallory has correlated with this vulnerability. Open in Mallory to drill down to specific CPE configurations and version ranges.
Vendor-confirmed product mapping. Mallory continuously reconciles this list against your asset inventory.
Recent activity
106 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
A high-severity privilege escalation vulnerability in the LiteSpeed cPanel user-end plugin that allows attackers with FTP or web shell access to gain root privileges on shared hosting servers running CloudLinux/CageFS.
A critical privilege escalation vulnerability in the LiteSpeed User-End cPanel plugin caused by improper handling of Redis enable/disable functions, allowing any cPanel user to execute arbitrary scripts as root on affected servers.
A maximum-severity privilege escalation vulnerability in the LiteSpeed User-End cPanel Plugin caused by improper handling of Redis on/off features via the plugin’s JSON API, allowing any authenticated cPanel user to escalate to root and take full administrative control of the server.
A critical privilege escalation vulnerability in the LiteSpeed cPanel plugin that can allow a compromised cPanel account to gain root access to the entire server.
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Every observed campaign linking this CVE to a named adversary.
Malware families riding this exploit, with evidence and IOCs.
YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.
Cross-references every affected SKU, including bundled OEM variants.
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