SignalWire says the FreeSwitch code injection flaw has been exploited in the wild; CISA's KEV listing gives federal agencies until 12 November 2026 to apply mitigations.
Attackers are using a password authentication bypass in OpenSSH on musl-based Linux to log into accounts whose password field is set to an asterisk, then hunting for keys, hashes and cloud metadata.
Previdian says attackers went after the musl-without-PAM password bypass quickly, and one honeypot gave up root. The bug only bites a narrow set of builds.
On Alpine and other musl libc builds with PAM disabled, some accounts accept any password between 257 and 1,024 characters. Fixes are in OpenSSH 10.6p2.
A password of 257 to 1,024 bytes gets past SSH authentication on some Alpine servers running the standard openssh-server package, including accounts with no password set.
A researcher says the bug has been in OpenSSH since 2016 and only bites on musl-based systems with password auth on and PAM off. It's fixed in OpenSSH 10.6p2.