CVE-2026-85706: Critical GitLab Path Traversal Exploited in the Wild

OverviewOn September 10, 2026, GitLab published a critical patch release for GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE). The release addresses CVE-2026-85706, a critical path traversal vulnerability (CWE-22) in the repository commits API with a CVSSv3.1 score of 10.0. According to GitLab, improper path confinement and missing authentication enforcement could allow an unauthenticated user to read arbitrary files from an affected GitLab server under certain conditions.On September 11, 2026, CVE-2026-85706 was added to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's (CISA) Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. CISA set a remediation due date of September 14, 2026, for affected Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies and marked the vulnerability as subject to forensic triage requirements under Binding Operational Directive 26-04.Organizations running affected self-managed GitLab instances should remediate CVE-2026-85706 on an emergency basis, outside of normal patch cycles.Mitigation guidanceA vendor-supplied update is available to remediate CVE-2026-85706. Organizations running affected self-managed GitL…

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