Description

More than 8,300 internet-exposed Gitea servers remain vulnerable to CVE-2026-60004, a critical code-injection flaw being actively exploited. The vulnerability allows attackers with repository write access to execute arbitrary shell commands with the privileges of the Gitea service account through the diffpatch API endpoint. Because Gitea enables self-registration by default, unauthenticated attackers can create an account and repository to obtain the required write access. Gitea released version 1.27.1 on July 27 to address the vulnerability. Shadowserver reported 8,393 vulnerable IP addresses on August 27, 2026, indicating that thousands of systems remain exposed. CISA added CVE-2026-60004 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities. In-the-wild attacks have reportedly involved deploying cryptocurrency-mining malware on vulnerable Gitea servers. Organizations should immediately upgrade to a fixed release and review systems for unauthorized repositories, Git hooks, processes, and mining activity. Gitea is a self-hosted Git and DevOps platform used as an alternative to GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket, with more than 400,000 installations. The widespread exposure creates significant risks for organizations hosting proprietary source code and development infrastructure. The incident also follows exploitation of another critical Gitea vulnerability, CVE-2026-20896, which affected authentication configurations in the official Gitea Docker image.