A critical-severity vulnerability in Orkes Conductor that can be exploited without authentication has been in attackers’ crosshairs for at least a month.
Conductor is an open source unified enterprise framework that allows organizations to orchestrate microservices, workflows, and AI agents.
Tracked as CVE-2026-58138 (CVSS score of 9.8), the critical bug is described as a remote code execution issue exploitable via inline workflow definitions submitted to the workflow API endpoint.
Attackers can include malicious JavaScript or Python expressions in the definitions to invoke arbitrary system commands. The flaw affects how Conductor runs scripts inside a workflow.
“An INLINE task (and LAMBDA, DO_WHILE, and SWITCH tasks) evaluates a user-supplied JavaScript or Python expression, and Conductor builds that evaluator on a GraalVM context configured with HostAccess.ALL,” Empirical Security explains.
This configuration disables the sandbox, and the attacker-supplied code reflects into the Java runtime and executes OS commands as the Conductor process, which often runs with root privileges.
“No login stands in the way, because the open-source server enforces no authentication by default and leaves its workflow API open. A single unauthenticated POST registers a workflow with a hostile INLINE task and starts it,” Empirical notes.
CVE-2026-58138 was patched in June in Orkes Conductor version 3.30.2. Proof-of-concept (PoC) code targeting it was published in early August, and exploitation started shortly after.
Empirical identified in-the-wild attacks on August 21, and Fortinet blocked roughly 1,300 exploitation attempts between September 8 and 9. This week, Fortinet released an outbreak alert on the vulnerability’s ongoing exploitation.
In addition to updating to Conductor 3.30.2 or later, organizations should restrict external access to Conductor’s workflow API endpoints and ensure Conductor deployments are behind a firewall and that their services are not directly exposed to the internet.
They should also monitor their instances for suspicious workflow submissions and unauthorized command execution, and review systems running vulnerable versions for signs of intrusion.
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