CVE intelligence

CVE-2026-41991

Vulnerability intelligence

Published Jun 29, 2026Sources checked Oct 27, 2026

4.7MEDIUMCVSS out of 10

What this means

Review the available evidence

CVE-2026-41991 and is rated Medium severity with a CVSS score of 4.7. It is not in the current CISA KEV record we collected. That does not prove exploitation has not occurred.

What to do next

Remediation and response

Ubuntu Security Notices guidance

Vendor revision: Sep 22, 2026

USN-8733-1 fixed vulnerabilities in Gzip.

CISA KEVNot listedBased on the latest collected catalog

EPSS0.1%Estimated 30-day exploitation probability

Ransomware useNot markedCISA KEV ransomware field

Threat actors0Source-linked actor relationships

Overview

What is CVE-2026-41991?

GNU gzip contains a vulnerability in the gzexe utility related to insecure temporary file handling. When the mktemp utility is not available in the user’s PATH, gzexe falls back to constructing a temporary file path based solely on the process ID (PID).

This predictable filename is created without exclusive access or existence checks. A local attacker can pre‑create the predicted temporary file path as a symbolic link pointing to an arbitrary file writable by the victim.

When gzexe runs, it follows the symlink and overwrites the target file, resulting in a time‑of‑check to time‑of‑use (TOCTOU) condition that allows arbitrary file overwrite.

This issue has been fixed in the commit 4e6f8b24ab823146ab8776f0b7fe486ab34d4269

Source: NVD