Exploited. On CISA's list since 2021-11-03, and used by ransomware.
GitLab Community and Enterprise Editions Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
CVE-2021-22205 · GitLab Community and Enterprise Editions · Published 2021-04-23
How bad would it be?
10.0 out of 10
CVSS rates it critical: about as damaging as flaws get.
How likely is it to be used?
over 99%
Estimated chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, among the top 1% of all scored flaws (EPSS, 2026-10-29).
Is it already being used?
Yes
CISA has seen it exploited in real attacks. For US government agencies the fix is deadline passed 1808 days ago (2021-11-17).
What CISA says to do
Apply updates per vendor instructions.
GitHub Community and Enterprise Editions that utilize the ability to upload images through GitLab Workhorse are vulnerable to remote code execution. Workhorse passes image file extensions through ExifTool, which improperly validates the image files.
What the flaw is
An issue has been discovered in GitLab CE/EE affecting all versions starting from 11.9. GitLab was not properly validating image files that were passed to a file parser which resulted in a remote command execution.
From the NVD.
Fixes and advisories
Learn this
Explore this week’s weaknesses and all learning topics
Understand the kind of weakness behind this flaw. These resources teach the weakness, rather than reproduce this specific CVE. Follow the vendor's advice above to fix the affected product.
CWE-20 · CISA KEV. We have not selected a close learning match for this label.
CWE-94 · NVD record: 134c704f-9b21-4f2e-91b3-4a467353bcc0; NVD record: nvd@nist.gov. We have not selected a close learning match for this label.
CWE-95 · CISA KEV. We have not selected a close learning match for this label.
CWE is a catalogue of weakness types. Labels come from the sources shown and can differ or change. Resource matches reviewed 16 October 2026.
On SentryFeed
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Exploited flaws from CISA's KEV catalogue. Chance of exploitation from EPSS by FIRST. Descriptions and scores from the NVD. This product uses the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD.