CISA Warns of Exploited Gitea Vulnerability

Summary

CISA has issued a warning about a critical remote code execution vulnerability in Gitea, tracked as CVE-2026-60004. This flaw, which allows attackers to plant executable Git hooks and run shell commands, was patched by Gitea developers in version 1.27.1. CISA has added it to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, mandating federal agencies to patch it by August 28. The exploitation is occurring in the wild, though the actors and their motives remain unclear.

Full text

CISA is warning organizations that a recently patched Gitea vulnerability allowing remote code execution is being exploited in the wild. Gitea is a widely used open source, self-hosted software development platform that provides Git hosting, code review, team collaboration, and CI/CD capabilities. Tracked as CVE-2026-60004, the exploited vulnerability was patched by Gitea developers in late July with the release of version 1.27.1. CISA added the flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog and instructed federal agencies to patch it by August 28. “Gitea contains a code injection vulnerability that allows an attacker with repository write access to send a malicious patch to the diffpatch API endpoint to plant an executable Git hook and run shell commands as the Gitea service account,” the cybersecurity agency explained. There do not appear to be any previous reports describing exploitation of CVE-2026-60004. It’s currently unclear who is behind the attacks and what their goal is.Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading. This is not the only Gitea vulnerability exploited in the wild in recent months. In early July, organizations were warned about the exploitation of a different flaw, CVE-2026-20896. It’s worth noting that CVE-2026-20896 has yet to be added to CISA’s KEV catalog. Related: Gitea Vulnerability Exposed 30,000 Deployments to Attacks Related: WordPress Websites Targeted via MiniOrange Plugin Vulnerabilities Related: CISA Warns of Exploited Oracle WebLogic Vulnerability Written By Eduard Kovacs Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is senior managing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher before starting a career in journalism in 2011. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering. 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Indicators of Compromise

• cve — CVE-2026-60004
• cve — CVE-2026-20896

Entities