
Critical Gitea RCE Vulnerability Enables Widespread Cryptojacking Attacks
In August 2026, CISA warned of active exploitation targeting CVE-2026-60004, a critical remote code execution vulnerability in Gitea with a CVSS score of 9.8. Attackers leveraged Gitea's default open registration feature to create accounts and repositories, then exploited the diffpatch endpoint to execute arbitrary shell commands and deploy cryptocurrency mining malware. The vulnerability affects all Gitea versions from 1.17 onward and was patched in version 1.27.1. One documented case involved a hosting provider temporarily limiting a victim's CPU resources due to excessive processor usage from the cryptojacking payload. This incident highlights the growing trend of supply chain attacks targeting developer infrastructure platforms. As organizations increasingly rely on self-hosted development tools like Gitea, attackers are focusing on these environments to compromise source code repositories and deploy resource-intensive cryptojacking operations that can disrupt business operations.
Kill Chain
