ServiceNow AI Platform RCE Flaw Exploited Days After Patch
TL;DR
- Exploitation began July 18, five days post-patch, consistent with attackers reverse-engineering the fix rather than independent discovery.
- Defused confirmed live payloads use a gadget chain not in the Searchlight Cyber PoC, breaking detection rules built on that technique.
- The /assessment_thanks.do endpoint is the confirmed entry point across all observed campaigns, giving defenders a concrete ACL blocking target while patching proceeds.
The gap between a vulnerability being patched and being exploited in the wild used to be measured in months. In this case it was four days.
SecurityWeek reported that CVE-2026-6875, a sandbox escape in the ServiceNow AI Platform, is now under active exploitation. ServiceNow deployed a fix to hosted instances on July 14, 2026. On the same day, the cybersecurity firm Searchlight Cyber disclosed technical details and showed how the vulnerability can be exploited. Four days later, threat intelligence firm Defused reported it had seen the flaw exploited in the wild.
The vulnerability itself is the kind of finding a security team dreads. It is described as a sandbox escape that an unauthenticated attacker can exploit to execute arbitrary code. No credentials required. The path from public PoC to captured payload was so short that Defused initially thought the attacker had built a variant, and later corrected the record when a closer look showed the payload was identical to Searchlight Cyber's own.
ServiceNow's carefully worded response is that it has not observed evidence the activity is related to instances the company hosts. That is a specific claim about hosted customers, which is exactly the population ServiceNow already patched on July 14. The exposed population is the self-hosted one, where administrators have to install the update themselves and where there is no vendor-side view into whether they have.
This is still a single observation from a single threat intel source. There do not appear to be any other public reports of exploitation as of publication. No one has published a count of vulnerable instances, a description of what attackers are doing once they land, or attribution to a known crew.
The forward-looking piece is who benefits from moving fast. Any self-hosted ServiceNow AI Platform customer that gets the patch on this week has bought themselves out of the window where a copy-pasted PoC is the primary threat model. The ones that do not are betting the exploit does not spread, and the last four days are not encouraging on that bet.
What others are reporting
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BleepingComputer Read →
Defused researchers first to document that live payloads hit the same endpoint as the PoC but escape the sandbox via a different code-execution path, confirming PoC-blind exploitation.
"We are observing in-the-wild exploitation of the ServiceNow pre-auth sandbox-escape RCE (CVE-2026-6875)" — Defused security researchers
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Help Net Security Read →
Independently corroborates Defused's finding that attackers pivoted to a gadget chain absent from the published PoC, adding a second source confirming PoC-bypass in active campaigns.
Attackers have begun exploiting CVE-2026-6875, a critical pre-authentication vulnerability in the ServiceNow AI Platform.
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CyberSecurityNews Read →
Deepest technical write-up: gs.include() abuse mechanism, JavaScript object property manipulation path, and ServiceNow's Guarded Script architectural response beyond the point patch.
Successful exploitation could lead to a full compromise of a ServiceNow instance, including access to data stored in tables.
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SecurityOnline Read →
Lists specific patched builds (Australia Patch 2, Yokohama Patch 12 Hot Fix 1b) defenders need to verify; notes low EPSS score despite critical CVSS as a prioritization data point.
An unauthenticated remote attacker could break out of the containment and run code within the ServiceNow platform itself.
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Rescana Read →
Adds actionable forensic IOCs: anomalous POST requests to /assessment_thanks.do, unexpected server process spawning, and unauthorized table access patterns for SIEM detection.
Attackers exploit the flaw by sending crafted HTTP requests to the /assessment_thanks.do endpoint of vulnerable ServiceNow instances.
Originally reported by securityweek.com
Read the original article →Original headline: Critical ServiceNow AI Platform Sandbox-Escape RCE (CVE-2026-6875) Under Active Exploitation