AI agent used Zammad zero-days to breach Dutch vulnerability disclosure non-profit

An AI agent autonomously exploited two unpatched Zammad vulnerabilities to compromise the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD) on September 21. DIVD, which disclosed the breach with help from Merlon Security and coordinated with NCSC-NL, says the agentic attack chained CVE-2026-102489, an unauthenticated remote code execution flaw in Zammad 6.3.0 through 6.5.4, with CVE-2026-102490, a privilege-escalation bug affecting every Zammad version (including the alpha branch) that lets a low-privileged zammad user become root. The organization described the intrusion as fast and chaotic, with the AI agent making self-directed decisions after each step, though some clumsy mistakes—like combining a man-in-the-middle attack with password spraying—helped researchers reverse-engineer its behavior. Neither flaw currently has an official patch; DIVD and NCSC-NL urge Zammad users to upgrade to version 7, where CVE-2026-102489 is not exploitable, or take exposed instances offline, while preserving logs and running DIVD's IoC script to check for compromise.