Nearly cut
Two PaperCut bugs, three days old, reached 395 organisations
Kept although it predates this window, because it is the attack the three fixes above are defending against, and this paper has never printed it.
GreyNoise counted 440 compromised PaperCut NG and MF servers across 395 organisations, more than one apiece, in 48 countries.
The campaign it describes ran from the last day of August. Neither bug is remote code execution on its own, and that is the mechanism. CVE-2026-81578 lets an unauthenticated request to the web management interface “trigger backend actions prior to the completion of access validation checks”, which is enough to write a configuration value. CVE-2026-82078 then reads one of those values, the database driver class name, and instantiates it “without validating against an allowlist of approved drivers”. The second needs high privileges, which the first hands it.
CVSS 3.1 calls the unauthenticated bug the worse of the two, at 9.8 against 9.1. CVSS 4.0 inverts that, 8.8 against 9.4, because the newer scale weights what a compromise reaches next rather than what it took to start.
Both records were published on 28 August, three days before the campaign GreyNoise dates. PaperCut’s fixed builds are 24.1.10, 25.0.13 and 26.0.5.
GreyNoise attributes the operation to AI agents, and its published evidence for that is behavioural: the campaign hit countries its operator appeared to have tried to exclude. It also names OpenAI Codex and a DeepSeek model as the tooling without disclosing an artefact that identifies either, and this paper does not adopt that line.
What it changes Upgrade to 24.1.10, 25.0.13 or 26.0.5; the fix is a version, not a setting. Then look through your own estate for the shape rather than the product: a bug that only writes configuration is a privilege escalation whenever some other component reads that configuration as a class name, a path or a URL.
The CVE descriptions, scores and publication dates were read at the NVD. The chaining of the two bugs is this paper’s reading of those two records; GreyNoise publishes no request sequence. The campaign counts are GreyNoise’s own and have not been independently confirmed. PaperCut’s own bulletin would not render on fetch, so the fixed version strings come from trackers quoting it rather than from PaperCut’s page.
NVD record, CVE-2026-81578 NVD record, CVE-2026-82078 Agents Gone Wild: an AI-orchestrated global campaign against PaperCut NG/MF