DIVD: Zammad zero-days let an AI agent breach its network

The Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD) says the recent breach of its network was made possible by exploiting a chain of two zero-day vulnerabilities in the open-source Zammad ticketing system.

The nonprofit, made up of volunteer security researchers, had earlier described the attack as "loud and very, very messy." It was driven by an AI agent that moved autonomously, deciding its next steps with no external intervention or direction.

An attack that documented itself

That autonomy, paradoxically, aided the investigation. The AI agent left behind clear explanations of its decisions, letting DIVD reconstruct the incident in detail.

According to the organization, the two flaws — now tracked as CVE-2026-102489 and CVE-2026-102490 — enabled session hijacking, remote code execution, and privilege escalation from the Zammad user to root. Used together, they let the attackers run through the whole chain in seconds — precisely because of the agentic nature of the hack, DIVD says.

After exploiting the flaws, the intruder reached other services and read and exfiltrated data from DIVD's systems, all in a matter of seconds thanks to AI automation.

Network segmentation and incident-response actions kept the threat actor from moving deeper into the network. The investigation, however, is still underway.

What Zammad is, and who should worry

Zammad is an open-source helpdesk and support ticketing platform used to manage customer inquiries, IT support requests, and internal tickets. It is available both self-hosted and as a hosted service. Zammad says it has more than 2,000 customers and 55,000 users, including De'Longhi, Amnesty International, and NextCloud.

DIVD discovered the vulnerabilities in collaboration with Merlon Security. It has notified Zammad and is alerting other owners of vulnerable instances.

Users are urged to upgrade to version 7, considered safe, or take their instance offline as soon as possible. DIVD has promised to share further details about the incident shortly.

Source: Bleeping Computer