THE CRUNCH
Cisco and WatchGuard have released patches for a batch of vulnerabilities this week, while SonicWall has told customers that two flaws in its legacy Global Management System (GMS) platform will remain unpatched. WatchGuard published five advisories, four of them covering critical-severity bugs, including CVE-2026-98432, a use-after-free issue in the Linux kernel's IPv4 networking code with a CVSS score of 9.8. The company also fixed three critical authentication flaws and one high-severity integrity validation bug in its AuthPoint Authentication Gateway. Cisco, meanwhile, patched CVE-2026-76506, a high-severity flaw in UCS Central Software that could let authenticated attackers run arbitrary code remotely or leak information.
The WatchGuard kernel bug needs some qualification: Fireware OS and WatchGuard AP ship the vulnerable kernel versions but the company says they are not affected by the remote code execution chain the flaw could enable. Dimension, which runs a vulnerable Ubuntu version, is a different story, and patches for it are not yet available.
Cisco has also updated its advisory on CVE-2026-111497, the exploited out-of-bounds write flaw in Google's Brotli compression library variously dubbed Node2Shell, HTTP2Shell and Broccoli2Shell. Nineteen Cisco products are affected, with dozens more still under investigation, and nearly a dozen Splunk products are impacted too.
SonicWall's position is the awkward one. Its GMS centralised management platform reached end of life in October 2025, and the company says CVE-2026-109593, a critical unauthenticated file read bug, and CVE-2026-109594, a medium-severity SQL injection that could expose or alter the GMS database, will not be fixed. Neither Cisco nor WatchGuard reports any sign of the flaws patched this week being exploited in the wild.