The Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD) says that the breach of its network was possible by exploiting a chain of two zero-day vulnerabilities in the open-source Zammad ticketing system.
Previously, the nonprofit organization of volunteer security researchers said the attack was “loud and very, very messy,” driven by an AI agent that moved autonomously and decided its next steps without external intervention or direction.
DIVD retrieved extensive details about the attack because the AI agent left behind clear explanations of its decisions, allowing the organization to reconstruct the incident.
According to the cybersecurity nonprofit, the two flaws, now identified as CVE-2026-102489 and CVE-2026-102490, enabled session hijacking, remote code execution, and escalation to root privileges.
After exploiting the vulnerabilities, the attacker was able to access other services, read and exfiltrate data from DIVD's systems, all actions performed in a matter of seconds, thanks to AI automation.
“Used together, they allowed the attackers to hijack sessions, run code remotely, and escalate privileges from the Zammad user to root, in seconds, due to the agentic part of this hack,” DIVD says.
Due to network segmentation and incident response actions, the threat actor did not move deeper into the network. However, the investigation is still underway.
Zammad is an open-source AI-powered helpdesk and support ticketing platform used to manage customer inquiries, IT support requests, and internal ticketing.
The solution is available as a self-hosted or hosted service, and Zammad claims on its website that it has over 2,000 customers and 55,000 users, including De’Longhi, Amnesty International, and NextCloud.
DIVD discovered the zero-day vulnerabilities in collaboration with Merlon Security. The organization notified Zammad about the issue and is alerting other users of vulnerable instances.
The nonprofit recommends that Zammad users upgrade to version 7, which is considered safe, or take the instance offline as soon as possible.
DIVD has promised to share additional updates about the incident tomorrow.
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