Human Attacker Exploits Marimo RCE, Reaches SSH Bastion in Eight Seconds
- ID
- 24644
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 15 Sep 2026, 7:52 PM
- Fetched
- 15 Sep 2026, 9:26 PM
- Provider
- The Hacker News
- Category
- security
- Original URL
- https://thehackernews.com/2026/09/human-attacker-exploits-marimo-rce.html
- Source URL
- https://feeds.feedburner.com/TheHackersNews
Summary
- Score
- 7.5
- Created
- 15 Sep 2026, 9:27 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_ml_learnersvibe_coders
What happened
Sysdig reports a skilled human attacker exploited CVE-2026-39987 (CVSS 9.3), a pre-auth RCE in all versions of Marimo notebooks, to pivot from a vulnerable Marimo instance to an SSH bastion host in eight seconds. The attacker hand-wrote a custom Python toolkit (no AI agent), harvested AWS credentials from the compromised instance, called AWS Secrets Manager, and used the retrieved private key for SSH access—all within a nine-hour session issuing 850+ interactive commands.
Why it matters
If you run Marimo notebooks in any environment, patch or restrict access immediately—this CVE is pre-auth and affects all versions, with active exploitation within hours of disclosure. The eight-second credential-to-SSH pivot means there is no manual response window; any exposed Marimo terminal WebSocket endpoint is effectively a direct path to your cloud secrets.
Discussion angle
The article contrasts this human operator against AI-assisted threat actors who fell into a trap the human skipped—worth discussing whether agentic security tooling is actually catching up to skilled humans, or if the gap is widening in the other direction.