Immediately after reports of CVE-2025-59287, a critical RCE flaw in WSUS systems, being exploited in the wild, another high-severity Linux kernel flaw has been observed being actively weaponized in ransomware attacks. CISA confirmed its exploitation and warned that abusing CVE-2024-1086 in offensive campaigns allows attackers with local access to gain root privileges on affected systems.
For the third year running, exploited vulnerabilities remain the most common technical root cause of ransomware attacks, involved in 32% of incidents, according to The State of Ransomware 2025 report by Sophos. Ransomware groups are increasingly leveraging software flaws as a primary entry point into enterprise systems, while social engineering and stolen credentials continue to play a major role in attacks. With over 40,000 new vulnerabilities logged by NIST this year, organizations face a growing challenge, as proactively identifying and fixing these flaws is essential to reducing the attack surface and defending against increasingly sophisticated ransomware threats.
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CVE-2024-1086 Analysis
CISA has recently released an urgent warning about a critical Linux kernel flaw, identified as CVE-2024-1086. This critical use-after-free bug (with a CVSS score of 7.8), hidden within the netfilter: nf_tables component, allows adversaries with local access to gain root privileges on affected systems and potentially deploy ransomware, which could severely disrupt enterprise systems worldwide or possibly cause arbitrary code execution.
The flaw was disclosed and patched in January 2024, though it originated from code introduced back in 2014. It was added to CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog on May 30, 2024, and in late October 2025, CISA issued a notification confirming that the vulnerability is known to be actively used in ransomware campaigns. Notably, the proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for the flaw is available since March 2024, when a researcher using the alias “Notselwyn” published a CVE-2024-1086 PoC on GitHub, demonstrating local privilege escalation on Linux kernels from 5.14 through 6.6.
Exploiting this vulnerability, attackers can bypass security controls, gain administrative access, and move laterally across networks. Once root privileges are obtained, ransomware operators can disable endpoint protections, encrypt critical files, exfiltrate sensitive data, and establish persistent access.
The netfilter subsystem, responsible for packet filtering and network address translation, makes this vulnerability particularly valuable for attackers seeking to manipulate network traffic or weaken security mechanisms. Typically, CVE-2024-1086 is exploited after adversaries gain an initial foothold through phishing, stolen credentials, or internet-facing vulnerabilities, turning limited user access into full administrative control.
CISA’s classification of CVE-2024-1086 as a vulnerability “known to be used in ransomware campaigns” underscores its severity and the urgent need for organizations to verify patch deployment and implement mitigating controls across Linux environments.
As a potential CVE-2024-1086 mitigation measure, the vendor advises disabling namespace creation for unprivileged users. To turn it off temporarily, running sudo sysctl -w kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=0 is recommended, while executing echo kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=0 | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/99-disable-unpriv-userns.conf serves asa persistent change after reboot.
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