Hackers Exploiting ‘SSHole’ Authentication Bypass in OpenSSH
C SecurityWeek ·
Admiralty grading (A–F · 1–6)
Source reliability
- A Completely reliable
- B Usually reliable
- C Fairly reliable
- D Not usually reliable
- E Unreliable
- F Cannot be judged
Information credibility
- 1 Confirmed
- 2 Probably true
- 3 Possibly true
- 4 Doubtful
- 5 Improbable
- 6 Cannot be judged
NATO Admiralty (AJP-2.1) grades confidence, independent of the risk score. Cross-source corroboration isn't tracked for non-CVE news, so single-source items are capped at a lower credibility number; a low number does not imply low quality.
Key insight
The report shows that the patched OpenSSH flaw is already being actively exploited by botnets and crypto miners, increasing priority for exposed SSH services.
Description
The CVE-2026-123158 vulnerability in OpenSSH is an authentication bypass caused by misinterpretation of whether a string is intended to be a password hash. Attackers can gain access to certain accounts by supplying a password between 257 and 1024 characters long. The flaw is rated high severity and was fixed in OpenSSH 10.6p2. Initial exploitation attempts are attributed to botnets and crypto miners, with other threat actors expected to follow.
Risk score
- cvss base
- 0.00
- kev bonus
- 0.00
- epss bonus
- 0.00
- poc bonus
- 15.00
- raw before weight
- 15.00
- industry weight
- 1.10
- freshness factor
- 1.00
- exploitability factor
- 1.00
- days old
- 0.00
- vendor mismatch penalty
- 0.00
- consensus penalty
- -3.00
Path: operational
Consensus check
The pipeline self-checks before delivery. These rules lowered the score:
-
TTP_SKIPPEDTTP mapping skipped (placeholder or aggregation article) −3
- Consensus penalty:
- −3.0
- Total penalty:
- −3.0