Threat actors have started exploiting a newly patched vulnerability in GitLab one day after public disclosure, attack surface management firm WatchTowr warns.
Tracked as CVE-2026-85706 (CVSS score of 10/10), the security defect is described as a path traversal issue that can allow unauthenticated users to read arbitrary files from the GitLab server.
All Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) versions from 18.7 before 19.1.8, 19.2 before 19.2.6, and 19.3 before 19.3.2 are affected.
On Friday, one day after GitLab announced patches for the security weakness, WatchTowr observed the first in-the-wild exploitation attempts targeting it.
“WatchTowr Intel is already observing in-the-wild probes for the latest critical GitLab Path Traversal vulnerability, CVE-2026-85706, which allows attackers to read arbitrary files in a single HTTP request,” the company said.
According to WatchTowr, mass exploitation of the vulnerability is likely to follow shortly.
“Defenders should hunt through log files for HTTP POST requests to ‘/api/v4/projects/{id}/repository/commits/’ URIs containing ‘file.path’ parameters to identify potential exploitation attempts,” the company noted.
Self-hosted GitLab instances should be upgraded as soon as possible, as the fresh patches resolve 17 other vulnerabilities, including another critical-severity bug.
The critical flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-87719 (CVSS score of 9.9/10), is an insecure deserialization issue in the GraphQL subscription serializer that could allow attackers to access “Advanced Search instance configurations and sensitive credentials”.
GitLab CE/EE versions 19.1.8, 19.2.6, and 19.3.2 also resolve six high-severity security defects that could allow attackers to achieve remote code execution, access protected CI/CD variables, mount XSS attacks, and cause denial-of-service conditions.
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