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A 32-Year-Old Bug Walks Into A Telnet Server (GNU inetutils Telnetd CVE-2026-32746 Pre-Auth RCE)

watchTowr LabsBy McCaulay Hudson25 min read

Patchtelnetdinetutils-telnetd
Read at watchTowr Labs

Below is the opening; the full story is at watchTowr Labs.

From watchTowr Labs

A long, long time ago, in a land free of binary exploit mitigations, when Unix still roamed the Earth, there lived a pre-authentication Telnetd vulnerability.

In fact, this vulnerability was born so long ago (way back in 1994) that it may even be older than you. To put the timespan in perspective: it came into existence the same year the seminal movie Hackers was released.…

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