CVE-2026-15779

MEDIUM
Published Jul 15, 2026 Modified Jul 15, 2026 CWE-732

Description

A flaw was found in samba's pam_winbind. When mkhomedir is enabled, pam_winbind chowns the target account's home directory without validating the path is not a critical system directory such as /. On affected systems, accounts with / as their home directory (a common default for system accounts) can have this triggered not only by root, but by a non-root user holding a narrow sudo delegation to run commands as that account, causing ownership of / to change and resulting in severe denial of service (SSH, sudo, and package-manager failures). The change does not grant write access to / (which ships with restrictive 0555 permissions on RHEL), so the impact is availability loss rather than further privilege escalation.

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CVSS v3.1 Score

6.1
MEDIUM
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:H

EPSS — Exploit Prediction

0.0010
Probability of exploitation
0.01%
Percentile rank

EPSS estimates the probability that this vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the next 30 days. A higher score means more likely to be exploited.

Weakness Type (CWE)

CWE-732 CWE-732

References

Frequently Asked Questions

What is CVE-2026-15779? +
A flaw was found in samba's pam_winbind. When mkhomedir is enabled, pam_winbind chowns the target account's home directory without validating the path is not a critical system directory such as /. On affected systems, accounts with / as their home directory (a common default for system accounts) can have this triggered not only by root, but by a non-root user holding a narrow sudo delegation to run commands as that account, causing ownership of / to change and resulting in severe denial of service (SSH, sudo, and package-manager failures). The change does not grant write access to / (which ships with restrictive 0555 permissions on RHEL), so the impact is availability loss rather than further privilege escalation. It has a CVSS v3.1 base score of 6.1 (MEDIUM).
How severe is CVE-2026-15779? +
CVE-2026-15779 has a CVSS v3.1 score of 6.1 out of 10, rated MEDIUM. This is a medium-severity vulnerability that should be remediated as part of regular maintenance. The EPSS score is 0.0010, placing it in the 0th percentile for exploitation probability.
How do I check if I'm vulnerable to CVE-2026-15779? +
You can use Secably's free Website Scanner to check your website for known vulnerabilities. For infrastructure scanning, use the Port Scanner to identify exposed services that may be affected. Check the vendor advisories linked above for specific patch and version information.

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