High CVSS 7.5
CVE-2026-40553
Buffer overflow vulnerability has been found in "extension/readdir.c" program file of gawk (ftype() routine). This issue could be used to crash the program and potentially to achieve code execution, although the latter has not been confirmed to be feasible. It affects gawk in versions 5.4.0 and below.
What this means
- Exposure
- Exploitable remotely over the network, without authentication and with no action from the victim.
- Impact
- An attacker can take the service offline.
- Weakness
- A stack overflow overwrites the return address, which often leads to code 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. Start with the instances exposed to the internet.
Read automatically from the CVSS vector, the weakness type (CWE) and the EPSS score. The technical description above remains the one published by NIST.