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 5.3th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
Threat & Defense at a Glance
Threat & Defense Details
Likely Mitigating ControlsAI
Per-CVE control mapping for this CVE has not run yet; the list below is derived from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry.
Alternate site allows resumption of operations if resource exhaustion at the primary site is exploited to cause unavailability.
Directly limits uncontrolled resource consumption that leads to denial-of-service.
Limiting concurrent sessions directly prevents uncontrolled resource consumption by capping the number of active sessions per user or account.
Analysis identifies uncontrolled resource consumption indicative of denial-of-service or abuse attempts.
Contingency plan testing includes resource exhaustion scenarios to verify recovery, making it harder for attackers to sustain exploits that cause uncontrolled consumption.
Updated contingency plans include current procedures to detect, contain, and recover from resource exhaustion, limiting an attacker's ability to sustain impact from uncontrolled consumption.
Alternate telecommunications services enable resumption of essential functions when primary services become unavailable due to uncontrolled resource consumption.
The team can analyze and respond to resource exhaustion incidents, reducing the impact of attacks that exploit uncontrolled consumption weaknesses.
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.
NVD Description
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.
Deeper analysisAI
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.
Details
- CWE(s)