{"id":229626,"date":"2026-01-23T01:22:22","date_gmt":"2026-01-23T07:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/critical-gnu-inetutils-telnetd-flaw-lets-attackers-bypass-login-and-gain-root-access"},"modified":"2026-01-23T01:22:22","modified_gmt":"2026-01-23T07:22:22","slug":"critical-gnu-inetutils-telnetd-flaw-lets-attackers-bypass-login-and-gain-root-access","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/critical-gnu-inetutils-telnetd-flaw-lets-attackers-bypass-login-and-gain-root-access","title":{"rendered":"Critical GNU InetUtils telnetd Flaw Lets Attackers Bypass Login and Gain Root Access"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/critical-gnu-inetutils-telnetd-flaw-lets-attackers-bypass-login-and-gain-root-access2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A critical security flaw has been disclosed in the GNU InetUtils telnet daemon (<a href=\"https:\/\/linux.die.net\/man\/8\/telnetd\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">telnetd<\/a>) that went unnoticed for nearly 11 years.<\/p>\n<p>The vulnerability, tracked as <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/nvd.nist.gov\/vuln\/detail\/CVE-2026-24061\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">CVE-2026\u201324061<\/a><\/strong>, is rated 9.8 out of 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system. It affects all versions of GNU InetUtils from version 1.9.3 up to and including version 2.7.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTelnetd in GNU Inetutils through 2.7 allows remote authentication bypass via a \u2018-f root\u2019 value for the USER environment variable,\u201d according to a description of the flaw in the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A critical security flaw has been disclosed in the GNU InetUtils telnet daemon (telnetd) that went unnoticed for nearly 11 years. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026\u201324061, is rated 9.8 out of 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system. It affects all versions of GNU InetUtils from version 1.9.3 up to and including version 2.7. \u201cTelnetd in [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1492],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-229626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229626\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}