CVE-2026-26066
Published: 24 February 2026
Summary
CVE-2026-26066 is a medium-severity Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (CWE-400) vulnerability in Imagemagick Imagemagick. Its CVSS base score is 6.2 (Medium).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Application or System Exploitation (T1499.004); ranked at the 5.4th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
The strongest mitigations our analysis identified are NIST 800-53 SI-10 (Information Input Validation) and SI-2 (Flaw Remediation).
Deeper analysis
CVE-2026-26066 is a vulnerability in ImageMagick, a free and open-source software suite for editing and manipulating digital images. In versions prior to 7.1.2-15 and 6.9.13-40, a crafted image profile containing invalid IPTC data can trigger an infinite loop when the IPTCTEXT writer processes it. This issue is classified under CWE-400 (Uncontrolled Resource Consumption) and CWE-835 (Infinite Loop), with a CVSS v3.1 base score of 6.2 (AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H), indicating high availability impact but no confidentiality or integrity effects.
A local attacker with no privileges required can exploit this vulnerability by supplying a maliciously crafted image file to an ImageMagick instance running IPTCTEXT. The processing of the invalid IPTC data leads to an infinite loop, causing resource exhaustion and denial of service, such as application hangs or system slowdowns. No user interaction is needed beyond local access to invoke the vulnerable code path.
The official patch is available in ImageMagick versions 7.1.2-15 and 6.9.13-40. Additional details are provided in the GitHub security advisory at https://github.com/ImageMagick/ImageMagick/security/advisories/GHSA-v994-63cg-9wj3, which security practitioners should review for full remediation guidance.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2026-7415
Vulnerability details
ImageMagick is free and open-source software used for editing and manipulating digital images. Prior to versions 7.1.2-15 and 6.9.13-40, a crafted profile contain invalid IPTC data may cause an infinite loop when writing it with `IPTCTEXT`. Versions 7.1.2-15 and 6.9.13-40…
more
contain a patch.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise TechniquesAI
Why these techniques?
The vulnerability directly enables local exploitation of ImageMagick's IPTCTEXT processing to trigger an infinite loop and resource exhaustion (CWE-400/835), mapping to application/system exploitation for endpoint denial of service.
CVEs Like This One
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5) AI
Directly requires applying the vendor patch in versions 7.1.2-15/6.9.13-40 that eliminates the infinite loop on invalid IPTC data.
Mandates validation of input data (IPTC profiles) to reject malformed content before the IPTCTEXT writer enters an uncontrolled loop.
Requires mechanisms to protect against resource-exhaustion DoS caused by the infinite loop when processing the crafted image file.