CVE intelligence

CVE-2026-42959

Vulnerability intelligence

Published May 20, 2026Sources checked Sep 27, 2026

7.5HIGHCVSS out of 10

What this means

Review the available evidence

CVE-2026-42959 and is rated High severity with a CVSS score of 7.5. It is not in the current CISA KEV record we collected. That does not prove exploitation has not occurred.

CISA KEVNot listedBased on the latest collected catalog

EPSS0.7%Estimated 30-day exploitation probability

Ransomware useNot markedCISA KEV ransomware field

Threat actors0Source-linked actor relationships

Overview

What is CVE-2026-42959?

NLnet Labs Unbound up to and including version 1.25.0 has a denial of service vulnerability in the DNSSEC validator that can lead to a crash given malicious upstream replies. When Unbound constructs chase-reply messages for validation, the code uses the wrong counter to calculate write offsets for ADDITIONAL section rrsets. DNAME duplication could increase the ANSWER section count and authority filtering could decrease the AUTHORITY section count and create an uninitialized array slot. Combining these two, the validator later dereferences this uninitialized pointer, causing an immediate process crash. An adversary controlling a DNSSEC-signed domain can trigger this bug with a single query by configuring a DNAME chain with unsigned CNAMEs and a response containing unsigned AUTHORITY records alongside signed ADDITIONAL glue records. Unbound 1.25.1 contains a patch with a fix to use the proper counters to calculate the write offsets.