However they also claim the mitigation "reduces exposure to this vulnerability but cannot fully prevent it", without elaborating on what that means or how it would be possible... I've also not seen anyone else make this claim.
That's what I call Steve Jobs style PR / Marketing you deflect the problem by making another problem to make it seem like you're fully aware. "You're holding the phone wrong"
I've seen another poster successfully updating their Kernel from Ubuntu's "proposed" branch which already has the fix. God knows why they don't merge it into stable.
FreeBSD is quietly prevalent in commercial settings. NetApp, for example. Separate from NetApp, a good chunk of America's sensitive database workloads are scheduled by Nomad or Kubernetes running directly on a kernel that is not Linux.
Directly downstream of FreeBSD, HardenedBSD achieved its long history of invulnerability to what were exploitable vulnerabilities in upstream through its advancements in the operating system layer.
For those not aware: Freenode.net is not Freenode as we all knew and loved it from the early 2000s to 2021. A hostile take-over of the Freenode LLC resulted in the loss of the domain name and some corporate assets. And the hostile takeover person Andrew Lee, deleted the Freenode database. It no longer exists.
"Freenode" in 2026 is an entity actively hostile to open source software and while what they say here might be true, they are only saying it because it aligns with their biases. They are not a real news source.
My mitigation for this lack of patches has been using iptables.
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m u32 --u32 "0>>24&0xF=6:15" -j DROP
Yeah and within 3 weeks it was back to the same old, like freenode had always been libera <3 And no more bullshit and hassle which Lee brought.
I was afraid the community would get splintered out but it didn't. The quick decisive action in establishing libera really helped that. Only a few channels left to go somewhere else (like alpine linux)
I really loved this example of a community massively saying Nope and just avoiding a hostile takeover altogether. Unfortunately it doesn't usually happen so well.
Yeah, I thought we stopped posting freenode links here on HN a while ago. Kinda surprised about this one (especially since it is covered in detail elsewhere as well)
'Vulnerabilities will always arise. What matters is the speed and success with which they are resolved – and nobody provides fixes available faster than Canonical.'
It's rather uninteresting to note, once again, that Ubuntu has decided to do this. I would like to know the (official, if any - unofficial/speculative otherwise) reason WHY they have not.
It does not seem that complicated to patch, and kernel upgrades are a dime a dozen these days. So what is making them delay a fix for so long?
How do we feel now about having pointless services listening for no good reason on open ports?
And do we feel about running no firewall?
For example Linux works totally fine without running dhcpcd and without running avahi. But on many systems where people think they run "no service", these two shall have ports open on your network and happily listening.
Sure, it's typically "only" on your LAN: but how long before we see exploits affecting even private LANs?
> about having pointless services listening for no good reason
I think you'll find that for most people, plugging the laptop in and having the network immediately available and automatically seeing their local printer is a pretty good reason.
> A zero-day (also known as a 0-day) is a vulnerability or security hole in a computer system unknown to its developers or anyone capable of mitigating it.
Apparently the meaning has evolved over the years.
I have not seen an exploit in the wild. I have at least 20 different servers unpatched (obviously) but the risk is blown way out of proportion. There are a number of mitigation options available.
I know something. Every fucking server with public facing infrastructure is not getting hacked left and right at the moment.
So you make of that what you will, but in my experience it means the exploitation comes hand in hand with some far more esoteric chain that is not easy to put in practice.
How would you see one? Have you deployed your own army of honeypots that are actively logging and looking for corrupt IP options packets? If you're not already looking for it, I think it's very likely that most people who get hacked will have no way of knowing how it happened, so we can't consider those incidents as being a result of this particular bug.
Are you actually monitoring for this specifically or just trying to use a sample size of 1 group of servers to prove something?
Jesus H Christ! the bug is a narrow use-after-free race that needs SYNs carrying ipv4 options to make it to the box. I do not need an army of honeypots to tell you it most likely doesnt to have a way into a classic 443 machine... come on now.
The recent wave of vulnerabilities has actually prompted a lot of people to set up honeypots, monitoring, etc. and the rate of actual exploits has been notably very low for the general public.
Most of the October CVEs we've seen were situations that require an extremely complex chain of attacks - amazing if you want to break into a bank, or fuck up some grocery freezers, not so useful for scanning random public boxes and doing "hacks of opportunity"
Apologies for the lack of links - it's a scattering of random people I've read talking about this, not any coordinated study. But if you read between the lines on all of the threads about these CVEs, you'll notice a lack of "I was hit by this" stories - which is pretty normal for more complex vulnerabilities.
The reason these sat unnoticed for so long is precisely because it's difficult to actually exploit them.
If anyone has anecdotes to the contrary, I'm definitely interested in hearing it, of course!
> I have not seen an exploit in the wild...but the risk is blown way out of proportion
That's a very naive view on it (now) and I'll try my best to explain why.
The bad actors can discover multiple 0-days on the fly to gain access to an employer/company infrastructure with valuable data/information, or in the case of Binance, crypto. They could chain multiple such attacks going from one-company/provider to another, to another, to eventually reach their target.
To anyone interested, this is good reading material on the topic:
(1) study the Binance hack in detail
(2) OpenAI huggingface hack - focus on 0-day chaining
> The following nftables table drops incoming IPv4 TCP packets that contain IP options, which reduces exposure to this vulnerability but cannot fully prevent it.
I suppose locally-running malicious programs could send packets to the loopback address or one of its own IPs or something.
This is one of the biggest benefits of using OpenWRT. They update the entire stack like every other month or so you’re never on an ancient kernel or utils.
Is it a cause of concern? Yes. Will you get hacked? Most likely not.
Most consumer routers run ancient stacks with all kinds of weird proprietary vendor patches that are tied to a specific kernel version. Looking at you Qualcomm!
However they generally also drop all traffic by default so from the WAN side they look like a black hole. I guess that's "safe" enough for most consumers.
For fun, take a look at the open PRs in the OpenWRT repos. Those people are doing some amazing work but it's also frustrating to see them struggle with things that _could_ be easy if the vendor made some slightly better choices.
I would strongly prefer something like OpenWRT though. Call me paranoid but after the last few weeks I'm increasingly less comfortable with connecting my devices to a blackbox.
I know the context here is consumer routers, but for those reading who might be running a server, or a homelab, or anything that does accept connections from outside, I want to make it clear that "most likely not" turns into "likely trivial if targeted" for servers.
AFAIK all the backdoors which have been found in some models are only accessible from the LAN side, and if you have an attacker inside the network, it's already too late.
> if you have an attacker inside the network, it's already too late.
Disagree, I think it's still a good idea to try to mitigate e.g. root escalations via this bug from devices within your network as well, as they could become compromised at any moment via other means and then promote themselves to root.
Google Wifi used to be good about that. I even got a notification for when my AP was being EOL'd and would no longer receive automatic firmware updates. I don't know if Google is still on the ball there. The Nest acquisition was confusing. Have the Google Wifi and Nest Wifi teams been merged?
MIPS and Arm have no security issues ever so never need patching which is an x86 only thing? Or maybe this comment is no more relevant than pointing out not all Arm patches apply to x86?
LLMs are giving script kids nation state level tools and expertise.
I'm on Comcast in USA, I BYOD for the router and it's a Netgear C3500 (I think). It gets new firmware pushed to it from Comcast. Can't even load your own manually.
Mosty probably: not. Traffic passes throught the ASIC, usually it is not processed on CPU or custom code. Unlike typical web servers, that reduces the attack surface as there aren't software parsers (a common place where vulnerabilities hide). Additionally the OS may have additional protection measures, such as signing each binary, signing the booting image and limiting which syscalls can be done by any binary.
The bug in question is not mitigated by any userspace actions (like signing binaries or boot images) or even by limiting syscalls, and all it takes is a listening socket on the device from either direction (inside or outside the network) to get root since router-destined packets are always processed by the CPU.
> Additionally the OS may have additional protection measures, such as signing each binary, signing the booting image and limiting which syscalls can be done by any binary.
I'd love for that to be true. Unfortunately, a lot of consumer routers are fairly straightforward Linux systems with no particular attempts at hardening.
i admit they don't enumerate their patches well, but the major residential router vendors do regular updates , usually indicated with "security fixes" .
unfortunately most lack SSH access or a real ability to test the kernel patch version.
Can't tell if Ubuntu is smart for deferring this patch until a bigger periodic release because there's no evidence it's been exploited and its exploitability is quite limited or if Ubuntu is dumb because there's a lot of publicity around this CVE and it comes off as failing to read the room.
I was previously Ubuntu-by-default for my random Linux boxen, but going to upgrade things and finding that Ubuntu didn't have a patch has shaken my faith in it. I probably won't choose it for new servers in the future.
Ubuntu was always the benefits of Debian without the inconvenient restrictions anyways, it wouldn't be surprising if their contradictive philosophy caused them to collapse by inability to eat the cake while having it simultaneously.
I've switched to Debian in professional servers around the time I learned how to use it without a Graphical Desktop Environments, that's roughly the stage at which a growing devleoper should drop the Ubuntu training wheels. Don't carry that into the workplace whenever possible.
I find it odd that no public discussions are highlighting that iptables or nftables can drop this before the kernel CVE is exploitable by a U32 drop rule in raw PREROUTING...
sudo iptables -t raw -I PREROUTING -p tcp -m u32 ! --u32 "0>>24&0x0F=5" -j DROP
I think they were saying if one uses such a rule in general (as is normal) but looking into it some more it seems it may actually be the default out of the box as well as long as you've enabled UFW:
> On installation, ufw is disabled with a default incoming policy of deny, a default forward policy of deny, and a default outgoing policy of allow, with stateful tracking for NEW connections for incoming and forwarded connections.
"default deny incoming" would apply to the filter INPUT chain, and there are several other chains that run before that one (raw, conntrack, mangle, nat), so it's better to use an explicit iptables or nft rule targeting the earliest "raw PREROUTING" chain.
Do note that eBPF can still bypass netfilter entirely, as can containers, or any process using a separate network namespace.
I respect that there is a quick fix I can do myself with iptables. However, I don't want to have to do that. I run Ubuntu with automatic security patches enabled, I trust the Ubuntu team to issue quick fixes and my server to be patched most of the time while I am asleep. I don't want to have to manually edit my server configuration to patch security holes and have to remember all these little knobs when I get EOL and have to rebuild my server.
Except in this case they have not issued any fix, for several weeks, to an extremely critical issue that most other distros have already patched for some time now.
> The following nftables table drops incoming IPv4 TCP packets that contain IP options, which reduces exposure to this vulnerability but cannot fully prevent it.
I know things like eBPF can technically bypass netfilter if someone tries hard enough, but I'm not sure if they're referring to any other ways to exploit this that a netfilter rule can't catch.
A system running multiple network namespaces might also not have the same mitigations applied inside all of them, so be sure to check all of those, except there's no great way of even finding all the different namespaces running on a Linux system for some reason (please prove me wrong if something exists! lsns is not enough).
But yes I agree it seems strange that most posts/articles/etc. are not prominently giving out mitigation strategies.
I have been running pure Debian for years on my router/home server. Ubuntu is a superset of Debian that adds mostly adds stuff that is irrelevant for a networking device. Just stick to base distributions unless you are a very good reason not to.
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[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 31.2 ms ] threadHowever they also claim the mitigation "reduces exposure to this vulnerability but cannot fully prevent it", without elaborating on what that means or how it would be possible... I've also not seen anyone else make this claim.
That's what I call Steve Jobs style PR / Marketing you deflect the problem by making another problem to make it seem like you're fully aware. "You're holding the phone wrong"
I am hoping to see an indication that https://grsecurity.net/ patches preemptively mitigated CVE-2026-98432 but I'm feeling less optimistic.
This vulnerability has been a stark reminder to why in some places things are running on HardenedBSD instead of Linux.
Directly downstream of FreeBSD, HardenedBSD achieved its long history of invulnerability to what were exploitable vulnerabilities in upstream through its advancements in the operating system layer.
_> but security thru obscurity
Arrogance is stupidity.
"Freenode" in 2026 is an entity actively hostile to open source software and while what they say here might be true, they are only saying it because it aligns with their biases. They are not a real news source.
My mitigation for this lack of patches has been using iptables.
I was afraid the community would get splintered out but it didn't. The quick decisive action in establishing libera really helped that. Only a few channels left to go somewhere else (like alpine linux)
I really loved this example of a community massively saying Nope and just avoiding a hostile takeover altogether. Unfortunately it doesn't usually happen so well.
It does not seem that complicated to patch, and kernel upgrades are a dime a dozen these days. So what is making them delay a fix for so long?
Which is a bad choice considering the impact imo.
The problem is as organisations grow, the more governance types get involved and slow things down with arbitrary rules.
And do we feel about running no firewall?
For example Linux works totally fine without running dhcpcd and without running avahi. But on many systems where people think they run "no service", these two shall have ports open on your network and happily listening.
Sure, it's typically "only" on your LAN: but how long before we see exploits affecting even private LANs?
Tighten your stuff up guys.
I think you'll find that for most people, plugging the laptop in and having the network immediately available and automatically seeing their local printer is a pretty good reason.
how you refresh dhcp lease if there is no service taking care of ? Why you think DHCP is pointless ?
> A zero-day (also known as a 0-day) is a vulnerability or security hole in a computer system unknown to its developers or anyone capable of mitigating it.
Apparently the meaning has evolved over the years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-day_vulnerability
So you make of that what you will, but in my experience it means the exploitation comes hand in hand with some far more esoteric chain that is not easy to put in practice.
How would you see one? Have you deployed your own army of honeypots that are actively logging and looking for corrupt IP options packets? If you're not already looking for it, I think it's very likely that most people who get hacked will have no way of knowing how it happened, so we can't consider those incidents as being a result of this particular bug.
Are you actually monitoring for this specifically or just trying to use a sample size of 1 group of servers to prove something?
Most of the October CVEs we've seen were situations that require an extremely complex chain of attacks - amazing if you want to break into a bank, or fuck up some grocery freezers, not so useful for scanning random public boxes and doing "hacks of opportunity"
Apologies for the lack of links - it's a scattering of random people I've read talking about this, not any coordinated study. But if you read between the lines on all of the threads about these CVEs, you'll notice a lack of "I was hit by this" stories - which is pretty normal for more complex vulnerabilities.
The reason these sat unnoticed for so long is precisely because it's difficult to actually exploit them.
If anyone has anecdotes to the contrary, I'm definitely interested in hearing it, of course!
That's a very naive view on it (now) and I'll try my best to explain why.
The bad actors can discover multiple 0-days on the fly to gain access to an employer/company infrastructure with valuable data/information, or in the case of Binance, crypto. They could chain multiple such attacks going from one-company/provider to another, to another, to eventually reach their target.
To anyone interested, this is good reading material on the topic:
(1) study the Binance hack in detail
(2) OpenAI huggingface hack - focus on 0-day chaining
Why does everything has to come with so much drama these days.
> The following nftables table drops incoming IPv4 TCP packets that contain IP options, which reduces exposure to this vulnerability but cannot fully prevent it.
I suppose locally-running malicious programs could send packets to the loopback address or one of its own IPs or something.
[1] https://access.redhat.com/security/vulnerabilities/RHSB-2026...
That's Game Over already.
Every consumer router-wirelessAP I've seen runs linux.
I never see security upgrades for the kernels they use. Not one. Not ever.
Is this something that should be a cause for concern? Even if you don't run a consumer-grade tplink, netgear, asus, whatever router yourself.
Most consumer routers run ancient stacks with all kinds of weird proprietary vendor patches that are tied to a specific kernel version. Looking at you Qualcomm!
However they generally also drop all traffic by default so from the WAN side they look like a black hole. I guess that's "safe" enough for most consumers.
For fun, take a look at the open PRs in the OpenWRT repos. Those people are doing some amazing work but it's also frustrating to see them struggle with things that _could_ be easy if the vendor made some slightly better choices.
I would strongly prefer something like OpenWRT though. Call me paranoid but after the last few weeks I'm increasingly less comfortable with connecting my devices to a blackbox.
How about forwarding a port for wireguard or ssh?
AFAIK all the backdoors which have been found in some models are only accessible from the LAN side, and if you have an attacker inside the network, it's already too late.
Disagree, I think it's still a good idea to try to mitigate e.g. root escalations via this bug from devices within your network as well, as they could become compromised at any moment via other means and then promote themselves to root.
I'm thinking of what to do myself.
The ghost of android releasing 6 month old patches every month is going to come home to roost.
That would be a bold claim and one I've never heard before. Hard not to be suspicious of it.
This secuirty floor is unlikely to be the only secuirty floor that ever happens to a kernel used by routers.
The point: Consumer routers do not seem to get updates. Ever.
Is that a worry or what?
But what do I know about it beyond that?
Some more commercial ones (pfsense is commercial) use it too like juniper junos.
Of course it does. But it was not affected in this particular case.
at least with an open source os there are more paths forward.
Granted they are pro-sumer devices, not strictly consumer.
MIPS and Arm have no security issues ever so never need patching which is an x86 only thing? Or maybe this comment is no more relevant than pointing out not all Arm patches apply to x86?
LLMs are giving script kids nation state level tools and expertise.
Defintely seems potentially better than no updates at all.
How do you know if you have a wide open CVE they're ignoring, like it's claimed ubuntu are doing?
I'd love for that to be true. Unfortunately, a lot of consumer routers are fairly straightforward Linux systems with no particular attempts at hardening.
full disclosure: they're my employer
unfortunately most lack SSH access or a real ability to test the kernel patch version.
[1] https://www.turris.com
10G looks a little less consumer-y. I'd imagine cisco, arista, etc do security updates if you want to go down that path.
you can use proposed pocket as per this for latest LTS releases
Ubuntu was always the benefits of Debian without the inconvenient restrictions anyways, it wouldn't be surprising if their contradictive philosophy caused them to collapse by inability to eat the cake while having it simultaneously.
I've switched to Debian in professional servers around the time I learned how to use it without a Graphical Desktop Environments, that's roughly the stage at which a growing devleoper should drop the Ubuntu training wheels. Don't carry that into the workplace whenever possible.
sudo iptables -t raw -I PREROUTING -p tcp -m u32 ! --u32 "0>>24&0x0F=5" -j DROP
> On installation, ufw is disabled with a default incoming policy of deny, a default forward policy of deny, and a default outgoing policy of allow, with stateful tracking for NEW connections for incoming and forwarded connections.
https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/noble/man8/ufw.8.html
The more specific rule is probably more useful if you do intend to expose a TCP port though.
Do note that eBPF can still bypass netfilter entirely, as can containers, or any process using a separate network namespace.
Except in this case they have not issued any fix, for several weeks, to an extremely critical issue that most other distros have already patched for some time now.
For many this now means their trust is broken.
Red Hat also claims that netfilter is not enough: https://access.redhat.com/security/vulnerabilities/RHSB-2026...
> The following nftables table drops incoming IPv4 TCP packets that contain IP options, which reduces exposure to this vulnerability but cannot fully prevent it.
I know things like eBPF can technically bypass netfilter if someone tries hard enough, but I'm not sure if they're referring to any other ways to exploit this that a netfilter rule can't catch.
A system running multiple network namespaces might also not have the same mitigations applied inside all of them, so be sure to check all of those, except there's no great way of even finding all the different namespaces running on a Linux system for some reason (please prove me wrong if something exists! lsns is not enough).
But yes I agree it seems strange that most posts/articles/etc. are not prominently giving out mitigation strategies.
Ubuntu abandoned its way years ago, closing source, centralising features under Canonical umbrella., etc.
Seeing people complaining about Ubuntu tells me more about them than the company itself.