High CVSS 7.4
CVE-2026-16851
IBM AIX 7.2, and 7.3 and IBM PowerVM VIOS 4.1 could allow a remote attacker to cause a denial of service due to a use-after-free.
What this means
- Exposure
- Exploitable from the adjacent network, without authentication and with no action from the victim.
- Impact
- An attacker can take the service offline. The impact spreads beyond the vulnerable component into other parts of the system.
- Weakness
- Already-freed memory is reused, letting the attacker reclaim it and hijack execution.
- Likelihood
- Its EPSS score stays low: nothing points to imminent exploitation, which is no reason to leave it unpatched.
What to doFold into the next patch cycle.
Read automatically from the CVSS vector, the weakness type (CWE) and the EPSS score. The technical description above remains the one published by NIST.