Is CVE-2026-40553 being exploited?

No public exploit is currently tracked.

How severe is CVE-2026-40553?

CVE-2026-40553 has a CVSS v3 severity of HIGH (7.5).

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CVE-2026-40553

Description

Buffer overflow vulnerability has been found in "extension/readdir.c" program file of gawk (ftype() routine). This issue could be used to crash the program and potentially to achieve code execution, although the latter has not been confirmed to be feasible. It affects gawk in versions 5.4.0 and below.