Vulnerability intelligence

CVE-2026-44945

A privilege escalation vulnerability exists in Rancher's impersonation middleware (pkg/auth/requests/impersonate.go). An authenticated Rancher user with the default user global role can gain full administrative access to the Rancher control plane and transitively to all downstream clusters it manages. This issue affects Rancher: from 2.11.0 before 2.11.16, from 2.12.0 before 2.12.12, from 2.13.0 before 2.13.8, and from 2.14.0 before 2.14.2.

CVSS Score

9.1

Critical

EPSS — Exploit Probability

0.3%

Riskier than 23% of all CVEs

Exploitation

Not in CISA KEV

No federal exploitation record

Remediation

Patch available

Vendor fix published

NVD entry Vendor patch PoC / advisory

1 article across 1 outlet · first covered Aug 11, 2026 · latest Aug 11, 2026

Coverage timeline

Critical Rancher Flaw Lets Users Hijack Kubernetes Clusters
securityonline.info · Aug 11, 2026