LiteSpeed cPanel Plugin Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

Added to KEV
2026-05-26
Federal due date
2026-05-29
Vendor
LiteSpeed
Product
cPanel Plugin
EPSS
92.2th percentile (score 0.080, as of 2026-06-08)
NVD CVSS v3.1
9.8 (CRITICAL)
Ransomware use
Unknown
Upstream
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-48172

CISA short description

LiteSpeed cPanel Plugin contains privilege escalation vulnerability that is exposed via the user-end cPanel plugin, which can be abused by any cPanel user account to execute arbitrary scripts with root privileges.

Required action

Apply mitigations per vendor instructions, follow applicable BOD 22-01 guidance for cloud services, or discontinue use of the product if mitigations are unavailable.

NVD description

LiteSpeed User-End cPanel Plugin before 2.4.5 allows privilege escalation (possibly to root), as exploited in the wild in May 2026. Detection is best done via a command line of grep -rE "cpanel_jsonapi_func=redisAble" /var/cpanel/logs /usr/local/cpanel/logs/ 2>/dev/null in Bash. If you get no output, you have not been hit with exploitation of the vulnerability. If there is output, we recommend you examine the IP addresses in the list, determine if they are valid IP addresses, and if not, block them. To determine damage done, examine the system logs for use by the detected IP addresses. The issue is related to mishandling of Redis enable/disable features. The recommended minimum version is 2.4.7.

EPSS percentile is the FIRST.org exploit-probability ranking as of the date noted above; it moves daily. CVSS reflects NVD's analysis at time of publication.