Over 8,300 Gitea servers vulnerable to code execution attacks

Over 8,300 Internet-exposed Gitea instances are still unpatched against a critical security flaw exploited in ongoing remote code execution attacks, according to cybersecurity watchdog Shadowserver.

The code injection vulnerability (CVE-2026-60004) targeted in these attacks was reported by Salesforce security researcher Shai Rod, and it allows authenticated attackers to execute arbitrary shell commands with the privileges of the Gitea service account by submitting malicious patches via the diffpatch API endpoint.

While successful exploitation requires repository write access to repositories hosted on vulnerable servers, Gitea comes with self-registration enabled by default, allowing unauthenticated attackers to register an account, create a new repository, and trigger the vulnerability without prior credentials.