A 32-Year-Old Bug Walks Into A Telnet Server (GNU inetutils Telnetd CVE-2026-32746 Pre-Auth RCE)

A long, long time ago, in a land free of binary exploit mitigations, when Unix still roamed the Earth, there lived a pre-authentication Telnetd vulnerability.

In fact, this vulnerability was born so long ago (way back in 1994) that it may even be older than you. To put the timespan in perspective: it came into existence the same year the seminal movie Hackers was released.…