iTerm2 RCE via cat readme.txt (CVE-2026-41253)
iTerm2, the terminal emulator that ends up on almost every Mac developer’s machine, is vulnerable to a remote code execution attack that occurs when attacker-controlled text is displayed in the terminal, most commonly through reading a file with cat, less, or head. CVE-2026-41253, disclosed on April 17, covers every stable release up through version 3.6.9, which is still the current build on the downloads page because the fix that landed in source on March 31 has not yet shipped in a new release. Researchers at Calif Global turned a plain file-display operation into a full shell as the logged-in user by abusing a legitimate SSH integration feature that iTerm2 trusts by default, without a single click, a single download, or a single signature for any security tool to catch. 😏









