Threat actors pounced on a critical Ivanti Sentry vulnerability within 24 hours of its disclosure, using a public proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit in attacks.
Ivanti disclosed Tuesday CVE-2026-10520, an OS command injection vulnerability that affects the company’s Sentry mobile gateway product prior to versions R10.5.2, R10.6.2 and R10.7.1. The vulnerability, which received a maximum severity CVSS score of 10, enables an unauthenticated attacker to remotely execute code with root privileges.
Ivanti disclosed the flaw along with another Sentry vulnerability, CVE-2026-10523, an authentication bypass flaw with a 9.9 CVSS score. In its security advisory, Ivanti initially said it was unaware of either flaw being exploited in the wild. But the situation apparently changed very quickly for CVE-2026-10520.
Public PoC for CVE-2026-10520 Triggers Exploitation
Cybersecurity vendor WatchTowr yesterday published a technical analysis of the flaw along with a PoC exploit. In a blog post the same day, Rapid7 warned the flaw is easy to weaponize and urged organizations to take immediate action.
“Given the trivial nature of exploitation and the availability of a public PoC, exploitation in-the-wild is likely to begin,” Rapid7 researchers wrote. “Organizations running affected versions of Ivanti Sentry should remediate these issues on an urgent basis before exploitation in-the-wild begins.”
Sure enough, attackers jumped on CVE-2026-10520 soon after. In a post on social media platform Mastodon, the Shadowserver Foundation said it observed “a large amount of Ivanti Sentry CVE-2026-10520 exploitation attempts based on the public PoC today.”
Specifically, Shadowserver spotted 19 vulnerable instances, at least two of which were backdoored. “While our detection is on the lowish side due to multiple Ivanti Sentry instances not reachable in our scans (blocklisted?), if you have not patched now you are most likely compromised,” Shadowserver said in the post.
Cybersecurity vendor Defused also picked up exploitation activity in its scans. Simo Kohonen, Defused founder and CEO, tells Dark Reading that attacks have “pretty much been non-stop active after the release of the Watchtowr PoC.”
Perhaps more importantly, Kohonen says the exploitation activity Defused observed was notable in that attackers launched the exploit directly against the company’s Ivanti honeypots, with no system fingerprinting or similar activity performed up front.
“It suggests whoever acted first had the Ivanti asset landscape mapped out already up front and was able to act very quickly once the vulnerability/exploit information became public,” he says.
Risks to Ivanti Sentry Customers
Ivanti Sentry, formerly MobileIron Sentry, is part of the vendor’s Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) platform and serves as an in-line gateway for mobile devices to enterprise systems. The appliance establishes on-demand, application-specific VPNs for services like email, securing traffic, and encrypting data.
Achieving root-level access on a Sentry instance via exploitation of CVE-2026-10520 could give a threat actor control over the appliance’s configurations, stored credentials, and integrated authentication or directory connections, according to SOCRadar.
“Ivanti Sentry often sits in a sensitive position in enterprise environments, acting as a control point for mobile and device access,” SOCRadar’s research team wrote in a blog post yesterday. “That placement can amplify the downstream impact if the appliance is compromised.”
In addition to extracting configurations, credentials, and other secrets from a Sentry appliance, SOCRadar said a threat actor could modify access requirements, weaken security controls, move laterally into an organization’s environment, depending on where the appliance is located.
The attacks on CVE-2026-10520 are the latest threat facing Ivanti customers. The vendor’s products have been heavily targeted by both cybercriminals and nation-state actors in recent years. Most recently, a critical flaw in the Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM), CVE-2026-1340, came under widespread exploitation in April.
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