A critical-severity vulnerability in Orkes Conductor that can be exploited without authentication has been in attackers’ crosshairs for at least a month.
Conductor is an open source unified enterprise framework that allows organizations to orchestrate microservices, workflows, and AI agents.
Tracked as CVE-2026-58138 (CVSS score of 9.8), the critical bug is described as a remote code execution issue exploitable via inline workflow definitions submitted to the workflow API endpoint.
Attackers can include malicious JavaScript or Python expressions in the definitions to invoke arbitrary system commands. The flaw affects how Conductor runs scripts inside a workflow.
“An INLINE task (and LAMBDA, DO_WHILE, and SWITCH tasks) evaluates a user-supplied JavaScript or Python expression, and Conductor builds that evaluator on a GraalVM context configured with HostAccess.ALL,” Empirical Security explains.
This configuration disables the sandbox, and the attacker-supplied code reflects into the Java runtime and executes OS commands as the Conductor process, which often runs with root privileges.
“No login stands in the way, because the open-source server enforces no authentication by default and leaves its workflow API open. A single unauthenticated POST registers a workflow with a hostile INLINE task and starts it,” Empirical notes.