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Linux Distros Unpatched Vulnerability : CVE-2026-16599

medium Nessus Plugin ID 340690

Synopsis

The Linux/Unix host has one or more packages installed with a vulnerability that the vendor indicates will not be patched.

Description

The Linux/Unix host has one or more packages installed that are impacted by a vulnerability without a vendor supplied patch available.

 - GNU wget is vulnerable to denial of service in its FTP OPIE/S-KEY authentication functionality. The server-supplied sequence number from the FTP challenge line is used as an iteration count for an MD5 key- derivation loop without any upper bound validation. A malicious FTP server or a network attacker positioned to intercept FTP traffic can send a crafted OPIE challenge with a sequence number near INT_MAX, causing wget to perform up to approximately 2.1 billion MD5 computations and suspend for some time. The
 --timeout option does not mitigate this because it applies only to network I/O, not CPU computation. This issue was fixed in commit e9697d98e7249b0f68a6be040a4f3dcc5bc101fa (CVE-2026-16599)

Note that Nessus relies on the presence of the package as reported by the vendor.

Solution

There is no known solution at this time.

See Also

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2026-16599

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2026-16599

Plugin Details

Severity: Medium

ID: 340690

File Name: unpatched_CVE_2026_16599.nasl

Version: 1.1

Type: Local

Agent: unix

Family: Misc.

Published: 8/26/2026

Updated: 8/26/2026

Supported Sensors: Agentless Assessment, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Frictionless Assessment AWS, Frictionless Assessment Azure, Nessus Agent, Tenable Cloud Security, Tenable Self-Hosted Container Security, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Low

Score: 3

Percentile: 23.65

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 4.3

Temporal Score: 3.7

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2026-16599

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.5

Temporal Score: 6.9

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:U/RL:U/RC:C

CVSS v4

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 5.1

Threat Score: 1.2

Threat Vector: CVSS:4.0/E:U

Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:A/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

Vulnerability Information

CPE: cpe:/o:centos:centos:7, cpe:/o:centos:centos:8, cpe:/o:debian:debian_linux:11.0, cpe:/o:debian:debian_linux:12.0, cpe:/o:debian:debian_linux:13.0, cpe:/o:debian:debian_linux:14.0, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:10, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:6, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:7, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:8, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:9, p-cpe:/a:centos:centos:wget, p-cpe:/a:debian:debian_linux:wget, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:wget

Required KB Items: Host/cpu, Host/local_checks_enabled, global_settings/vendor_unpatched, Host/OS/identifier

Exploit Ease: No known exploits are available

Vulnerability Publication Date: 8/25/2026

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2026-16599