{"id":229864,"date":"2026-01-27T02:21:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-27T08:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/nearly-800000-telnet-servers-exposed-to-remote-attacks"},"modified":"2026-01-27T02:21:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T08:21:08","slug":"nearly-800000-telnet-servers-exposed-to-remote-attacks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/nearly-800000-telnet-servers-exposed-to-remote-attacks","title":{"rendered":"Nearly 800,000 Telnet servers exposed to remote attacks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/nearly-800000-telnet-servers-exposed-to-remote-attacks.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Internet security watchdog Shadowserver tracks nearly 800,000 IP addresses with Telnet fingerprints amid ongoing attacks exploiting a critical authentication bypass vulnerability in the GNU InetUtils telnetd server.<\/p>\n<p>The security flaw (CVE-2026\u201324061) impacts GNU InetUtils versions 1.9.3 (released 11 years ago in 2015) through 2.7 and was patched in version 2.8 (released on January 20).<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe telnetd server invokes \/usr\/bin\/login (normally running as root) passing the value of the USER environment variable received from the client as the last parameter,\u201d <a href=\"http:\/\/seclists.org\/oss-sec\/2026\/q1\/89\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">explained<\/a> open-source contributor Simon Josefsson, who reported it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Internet security watchdog Shadowserver tracks nearly 800,000 IP addresses with Telnet fingerprints amid ongoing attacks exploiting a critical authentication bypass vulnerability in the GNU InetUtils telnetd server. The security flaw (CVE-2026\u201324061) impacts GNU InetUtils versions 1.9.3 (released 11 years ago in 2015) through 2.7 and was patched in version 2.8 (released on January 20). \u201cThe [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,418],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-229864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cybercrime-malcode","category-internet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229864","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=229864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229864\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}