SOC status:Duty analyst on shift

UK Cyber Defence
VulnerabilityAwaiting Analysis

CVE-2026-87874

Because memcached is unauthenticated and cache keys are predictable, an attacker able to reach a network-exposed or shared memcached instance can write a crafted pickle payload that is deserialized and executed on the Ansible controller when the…

HIGH 8.1EPSS 0.43%

Does this matter?

High impact if exploited, but EPSS currently rates exploitation as unlikely (0.43%). Schedule it in the normal patch cycle and watch for a rise in EPSS or a public exploit.

Description

A flaw was found in the memcached cache plugin of the community.general Ansible collection. Although its documentation states that records are stored in JSON format, the plugin performs no explicit serialization and relies on python-memcached, which pickles values on write and unpickles them on read. Because memcached is unauthenticated and cache keys are predictable, an attacker able to reach a network-exposed or shared memcached instance can write a crafted pickle payload that is deserialized and executed on the Ansible controller when the poisoned fact cache is next read, leading to remote code execution.

CVSS 3.1
8.1 HIGHCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
EPSS
0.43% probability · 36th percentile
CISA KEV
Not listed
Weakness
CWE-502
Source
secalert@redhat.com

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA. Refreshed daily.