CISA Orders Federal Agencies to Patch BeyondTrust Vulnerability Within 72 Hours
US Agencies Directed to Patch Critical Vulnerability in BeyondTrust’s Remote Support Software
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has directed federal agencies to patch a critical vulnerability in BeyondTrust’s Remote Support software within three days.
Vulnerability Details
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-1731, is a remote code execution flaw that stems from an OS command injection weakness. It affects versions 25.3.1 or earlier of Remote Support and 24.3.4 or earlier of Privileged Remote Access.
According to Hacktron, the researcher who discovered the vulnerability, approximately 11,000 BeyondTrust Remote Support instances were exposed online, with around 8,500 being on-premises deployments.
Exploitation and Patching
Following the release of security patches, attackers began actively exploiting the vulnerability, prompting CISA to add it to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. BeyondTrust patched the vulnerability on February 2, 2026, for all SaaS instances, but on-premise customers must apply the patches manually.
CISA’s Warning
CISA ordered Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies to secure their BeyondTrust instances by the end of February 16, as mandated by Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01. The agency warned that these types of vulnerabilities are frequent attack vectors for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risks to the federal enterprise.
Previous Incidents
This is not the first time BeyondTrust security flaws have been exploited to compromise US government agencies. In a previous incident, the US Treasury Department’s network was hacked by the Silk Typhoon, a Chinese state-backed cyberespionage group, which exploited two zero-day bugs to breach BeyondTrust’s systems and compromise 17 Remote Support SaaS instances.
The Silk Typhoon group has also targeted other US government agencies, including the Office of Foreign Assets Control and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.
Importance of Patching
CISA’s warning serves as a reminder of the importance of prompt patching and mitigation of known vulnerabilities to prevent exploitation by malicious actors.
