Ravie LakshmananMay 17, 2026Server Security / Vulnerability
A newly disclosed security flaw impacting NGINX Plus and NGINX Open has come under active exploitation in the wild, days after its public disclosure, according to VulnCheck.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-42945 (CVSS score: 9.2), is a heap buffer overflow in ngx_http_rewrite_module affecting NGINX versions 0.6.27 through 1.30.0. According to AI-native security company depthfirst, the vulnerability was introduced in 2008.
Successful exploitation of the flaw can permit an unauthenticated attacker to crash worker processes or execute remote code with crafted HTTP requests. However, it bears noting that code execution is possible only on devices where Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), a safeguard against memory-based attacks, is turned off.
"It relies on a specific NGINX config to be vulnerable, and for an attacker to know or discover the config to exploit it," security researcher Kevin Beaumont said. "To reach RCE [remote code execution], also ASLR needs to have been disabled on the box."
