Security researchers are raising concerns after GitLab on Monday issued an out-of-band patch for a critical code injection vulnerability. 

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-19478, could enable an attacker to remotely modify or delete a public project as well as user data through a Graph QL directive. The flaw has a severity score of 9.4 out of 10.

The flaw was reported through the HackerOne bug bounty program. 

Threat intelligence firm watchTowr warned Tuesday that it was able to reproduce the vulnerability within minutes of the public disclosure. Researchers said an attacker could do significant damage by exploiting this particular flaw. 

“The newly disclosed code injection vulnerability allows an unauthenticated attacker to delete publicly accessible GitLab projects and rewrite their state,” Jake Knott, principal security researcher at watchTowr, said. 

An attacker would be able to engage in a range of malicious activities, including deletion of entire repositories, forging merge records or banning maintainers through a single HTTP request without the need for credentials or user interaction. 

Organizers running internet-facing, self-hosted GitLab instances should immediately upgrade to a patched release, according to Knott. If they can’t upgrade right away, they can restrict unauthenticated access to “api/graphql.” Otherwise, as a final option, they can remove public repository access.  

Researchers at watchTowr on Wednesday confirmed they are seeing in-the-wild exploitation reaching the company’s honeypot network. 

“This is the new reality of vulnerability reproduction and exploitation, where AI-enabled attackers are able to compress the time from disclosure to exploitation. And waiting until the next patch cycle is often too late,” said Knott.

Security teams that have not yet patched should hunt through web logs and look for requests containing “gl_introduced” and check for signs of being probed.

The GitLab release also addresses a cross-site request forgery vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-19650. Under certain conditions, an attacker would be able to execute mutations via GET requests. 

Editor’s note: Adds additional comment from watchTowr.