GitLab Vulnerability Exploited One Day After Disclosure

WatchTowr has detected in-the-wild exploitation of a critical path traversal vulnerability in GitLab, identified as CVE-2026-85706 with a CVSS score of 10/10. This defect enables unauthenticated attackers to read arbitrary files from the server through a single HTTP request and affects all Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) releases prior to 19.1.8, 19.2.6, and 19.3.2. The active exploitation began just one day following GitLab's public disclosure and patching of the issue.

Defenders are advised to upgrade to the fixed versions immediately, as these releases also address six high-severity flaws, including a separate critical deserialization bug (CVE-2026-87719) that exposes sensitive credentials.