CVE-2026-76489
Published on October 21, 2026

Multiple Cisco Products Snort 3 Generic File Processing Memory Exhaustion Denial of Service Vulnerability
Multiple Cisco products are affected by a vulnerability in the memory management implementation of Snort 3 that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause the Snort 3 Detection Engine to restart, resulting in an interruption of packet inspection. This vulnerability is due to incomplete error checking when Snort 3 processes files, which could cause unreleased memory. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a large number of files to be processed. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the Snort 3 Detection Engine to restart unexpectedly, resulting in a DoS condition.

NVD

Vulnerability Analysis

CVE-2026-76489 can be exploited with network access, and does not require authorization privileges or user interaction. This vulnerability is considered to have a low attack complexity. The potential impact of an exploit of this vulnerability is considered to have no impact on confidentiality and integrity, and a small impact on availability.

Attack Vector:
NETWORK
Attack Complexity:
LOW
Privileges Required:
NONE
User Interaction:
NONE
Scope:
CHANGED
Confidentiality Impact:
NONE
Integrity Impact:
NONE
Availability Impact:
LOW

Weakness Type

What is a Memory Leak Vulnerability?

The software does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, which slowly consumes remaining memory. This is often triggered by improper handling of malformed data or unexpectedly interrupted sessions. In some languages, developers are responsible for tracking memory allocation and releasing the memory. If there are no more pointers or references to the memory, then it can no longer be tracked and identified for release.

CVE-2026-76489 has been classified to as a Memory Leak vulnerability or weakness.


Affected Versions

Cisco Open Source Snort3: Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) Software: