Organizations and individuals relying on Wireshark for network monitoring, forensics, and traffic analysis should update immediately to Wireshark 4.6.5.
The most severe vulnerabilities in this release carry the potential for remote code execution (RCE), moving beyond simple denial-of-service impact. Four dissectors and parsers were found susceptible:
These vulnerabilities are particularly dangerous because Wireshark is routinely run with elevated privileges in enterprise and SOC environments, meaning successful exploitation could grant attackers significant system access.
A large portion of the patched flaws cause application crashes when specific protocol dissectors process malformed or adversarially crafted packets. Affected dissectors span a wide range of protocols:
An attacker on the same network segment can trigger these crashes by injecting specially crafted packets, requiring no authentication or prior access to the target system.
Several vulnerabilities cause infinite loops, effectively hanging Wireshark and consuming system resources in a sustained denial-of-service condition:
These loop-based flaws are especially problematic in automated traffic capture pipelines where Wireshark runs unattended, as a single malformed packet can permanently halt analysis.
Two low-level vulnerabilities target Wireshark’s core dissection engine rather than individual protocol parsers:
These engine-level flaws affect any protocol using compressed payloads, substantially broadening the attack surface beyond specific protocol dissectors.
| Component | Vulnerability Type | CVE Examples |
|---|---|---|
| TLS, RDP, SBC, Profile Import | Crash + Possible Code Execution | CVE-2026-5402, 5403, 5405, 5656 |
| SMB2, TLS, MBIM, OpenFlow | Infinite Loop / DoS | CVE-2026-5407, 6528, 6519, 6521 |
| Multiple Dissectors (20+) | Dissector Crash / DoS | CVE-2026-5299 through CVE-2026-6870 |
| Dissection Engine | zlib/LZ77 Decompression Crash | CVE-2026-6535, CVE-2026-6533 |
The Wireshark team notes this batch of fixes is partly attributed to AI-assisted vulnerability reporting, which accelerated discovery across many protocol modules simultaneously. Users are strongly advised to update to the latest patched release of Wireshark 4.6.5 immediately via the official Wireshark download page.
Organizations running Wireshark in live capture or SIEM-integrated modes should treat this update as a critical priority, given the code execution potential in TLS, RDP, and SBC components.
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The post Critical Wireshark Vulnerabilities Let Attackers Execute Arbitrary Code Via Malformed Packets appeared first on Cyber Security News.
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