The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned that hackers are now exploiting a maximum-severity GitLab vulnerability in attacks.
GitLab's DevSecOps platform is used by over 50% of Fortune 100 companies and has over 30 million registered users worldwide.
The security flaw (tracked as CVE-2026-85706) stems from missing authentication enforcement and improper path confinement in the repository commits API, and unauthenticated attackers can exploit it to read credentials, secrets, and other sensitive information from vulnerable servers.
GitLab fixed this security issue in GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) versions 19.3.2, 19.2.6, and 19.1 on Thursday, and urged users to patch their systems immediately.
While the company has yet to tag this vulnerability as actively exploited, cybersecurity firm watchTowr reported one day later that attackers were probing the Internet for GitLab servers unpatched against CVE-2026-85706.
"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," it warned.