MikroTik RouterOS SSH Flaws Exploited in Wild
CERT Polska confirms attackers are chaining two RouterOS SSH vulnerabilities (dubbed MikroTrick) to gain full unauthenticated control of internet-exposed MikroTik routers.
Sourcecert.pl — open the original
What to check
- Applies to
- The 3 CVEs named below. Whether you run an affected version is not assessed: check the versions the source lists.
- Exploitation
- CISA lists CVE-2026-67277 and CVE-2026-86060 as exploited in the wild.
CERT Polska disclosed six vulnerabilities in MikroTik RouterOS affecting the SSH server/client, the bandwidth-test service, X.509 certificate handling, and the WebFig interface. Two of these — an SSH public-key authentication bypass (CVE-2026-67276) and a crafted-username privilege manipulation flaw (CVE-2026-86060) — can be chained to give an unauthenticated attacker full administrative control of any RouterOS device that exposes SSH to the internet. CERT Polska has named this chain "MikroTrick" and confirmed it is being actively exploited against internet-facing devices; MikroTik's patches (7.25beta3, 7.24.2, 7.23.4, 6.49.21) have been verified to stop the observed attacks. A third notable flaw, an unauthenticated memory-disclosure/DoS bug in the bandwidth-test service (CVE-2026-67277), can leak kernel memory or crash the device.
Post-patch, RouterOS includes a new "Flagged" mechanism that scans configuration at startup for known signs of compromise and logs a warning marker, but CERT Polska stresses this only detects specific known artifacts and its absence does not prove a device is clean. Observed compromise indicators include SSH log entries showing "login failure for user -2" followed by a user added via "ssh:-2@<ip>", and the presence of an unexpected highly-privileged account named "ops". Notably, the vulnerabilities were discovered using an LLM-assisted (GPT-5.5/5.6) automated research pipeline under OpenAI's GTAC program, combined with human-verified lab testing.
Defenders running MikroTik RouterOS, particularly with SSH, WebFig, or bandwidth-test exposed to the internet, should patch immediately, audit for unknown users/scripts/scheduler tasks/proxies/tunnels, check the Flagged marker and logs for the indicators described, and if compromise is suspected, isolate the device, preserve logs/config, and rebuild from a trusted configuration rather than restoring a backup from a potentially compromised device.
Mentioned in this report
Source reporting: https://cert.pl/en/posts/2026/09/vulnerabilities-in-mikrotik-routeros-actively-exploited
Free public brief. Slack alerts on the vendors you run come with the paid plans, and a new account gets three days of them, no card.
What this brief leaves out
This page is the free tier: the write-up, the severity, the names. In the app the same report carries live profiles of the CVEs and campaigns it names. The paid plans add the security research and news reporting the free tier leaves out.
It sits in a corpus of 16,436 reports from 149 sources, 661 of them written in the last seven days, and it grows through the day.
A new account starts with three days of all of it, no card, then keeps the government and CERT reporting free. Slack alerts are a paid-plan feature: name the vendors you run and Slack hears about the reports that touch them, not the rest of the week's. Nothing is charged unless you subscribe.
Create a free account What it costs