Ivanti Sentry pre-auth OS command injection to root (MICS handleMessage), CVSS 10.0; public PoC by watchTowr

Ivanti Sentry CVE-2026-10520 — exploitation confirmed in the wild, gateways backdoored

UPDATE · originally covered CVE-2026-10520 / CVE-2026-10523 — Ivanti Sentry: pre-auth OS command injection to root (CVSS 10.0), public PoC published today (2026-06-10)

the Ivanti Sentry MICS command-injection covered last week as an advisory-plus-patch story is now confirmed exploited. After watchTowr published a working proof-of-concept on 10 June, the Shadowserver Foundation observed mass exploitation attempts and confirmed that at least two of the then-19 internet-exposed Sentry instances had been backdoored shortly after the PoC went public (Security Affairs, 2026-06-11).

The flaw (CVSS 10.0) is reachable by an unauthenticated POST to the MICS handleMessage interface and executes arbitrary OS commands as root, giving an attacker control over every mailbox, calendar and enterprise application the gateway brokers (T1190 Exploit Public-Facing Application; T1505.003 Web Shell post-exploitation). CISA added the CVE to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 11 June and CERT-EU issued advisory 2026-008 urging immediate upgrade (CERT-EU 2026-008, 2026-06-10; BleepingComputer, 2026-06-12). The operational driver is the confirmed in-the-wild backdooring, not any compliance date: any internet-reachable Sentry should be treated as presumed-compromised and compromise-assessed, not merely patched. Affected: Sentry ≤ R10.5.1, ≤ R10.6.1, ≤ R10.7.0; fixed in R10.5.2 / R10.6.2 / R10.7.1. See the § 0 Immediate Action callout and § 6.

CVE-2026-10520 / CVE-2026-10523 — Ivanti Sentry: pre-auth OS command injection to root (CVSS 10.0), public PoC published today

CVE-2026-10520 is an unauthenticated OS command injection in Ivanti Sentry (formerly MobileIron Sentry), the EMM/MDM enforcement gateway that proxies email and applications to managed devices and frequently fronts Exchange. The vulnerable endpoint is /mics/api/v2/sentry/mics-config/handleMessage on the MICS admin API (port 8443): ConfigServiceController.handleMessage() accepts XML payloads containing commandexec blocks whose reqandres field is passed unvalidated through ConfigRequestProcessor.handleExecute() into native command execution, yielding root-level RCE with no authentication (watchTowr, 2026-06-10). watchTowr published the technical analysis and a working PoC on 2026-06-10; CVE-2026-10523 is a companion authentication bypass (CWE-288) covered in the same Ivanti advisory (watchTowr, 2026-06-10). No in-the-wild exploitation is confirmed yet, but a same-day public PoC against a pre-auth root RCE on a government-grade MDM gateway sharply compresses the window. Affected: all Sentry before R10.5.2 / R10.6.2 / R10.7.1; patch immediately and restrict the MICS interface (8443) to management IPs in the interim (T1190, T1059.004).