GitLab urged users on Thursday to patch their servers immediately against a maximum-severity path traversal vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026-85706.
The security flaw, discovered by a security researcher using the ‘s3ntago‘ handle and reported via GitLab’s HackerOne bug bounty program, stems from improper path confinement and missing authentication enforcement in the repository commits API.
Unauthenticated attackers can exploit CVE-2026-85706 “under certain conditions” to read arbitrary data (e.g., credentials, secrets, and sensitive information) from vulnerable servers.
While GitLab has yet to flag this flaw as exploited in the wild, one day later, cybersecurity company watchTowr reported that attackers have already begun searching for Internet-exposed GitLab servers unpatched against CVE-2026-85706.
“watchTowr Intel is already observing in-the-wild probes for the latest critical GitLab Path Traversal vulnerability, CVE-2026-85706, which allows attackers to read arbitrary files in a single HTTP request,” it warned.
“Based on recent GitLab vulnerabilities, we know the time until indiscriminate exploitation is likely not far away. [..] Defenders should also hunt through log files for HTTP POST requests to ‘/api/v4/projects/{id}/repository/commits/’ URIs containing ‘file.path’ parameters to identify potential exploitation attempts.”
Yesterday, GitLab patched a second critical vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026-87719 that stems from an insecure deserialization weakness in the GraphQL subscription serializer.
CVE-2026-87719 affects GitLab EE and allows authenticated users with Duo Chat access to steal sensitive credentials and Advanced Search instance configurations.
Admins warned to patch as soon as possible
GitLab fixed the two security issues in GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) versions 19.3.2, 19.2.6, and 19.1 on Thursday, and urged users to patch their systems immediately.
“These versions contain important bug and security fixes, and we strongly recommend that all self-managed GitLab installations be upgraded to one of these versions immediately,” the company warned on Thursday. “GitLab.com is already running the patched version. GitLab Dedicated customers do not need to take action.”
In May 2023, GitLab addressed another maximum severity path traversal flaw (CVE-2023-2825) that exposes sensitive data, including proprietary software code, user credentials, tokens, and files on unpatched servers.
One year later, CISA and the FBI urged software companies to weed out path traversal security vulnerabilities from their products before shipping, saying that such flaws “have been called ‘unforgivable’ since at least 2007.”
More recently, in January, GitLab also patched a high-severity two-factor authentication bypass affecting community and enterprise editions that enables attackers who know the target’s account ID to circumvent two-factor authentication.
Since November 2021, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has flagged four GitLab vulnerabilities as exploited in attacks, including two (CVE-2021-22175 and CVE-2021-39935) in February this year.
The GitLab DevSecOps platform has more than 30 million registered users and is used by over 50% of Fortune 100 companies, including Nvidia, Airbus, T-Mobile, Lockheed Martin, Goldman Sachs, and UBS.
Update September 11, 09:39 EDT: Added watchTowr’s report of CVE-2026-85706 probing.
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