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Denial of Service in containerd via crafted container image memory exhaustion

IdentifiersCVE-2026-47262CWE-400

CVE-2026-47262 is a denial-of-service vulnerability in containerd's image-handling path. A maliciously crafted container image can trigger uncontrolled memory consumption during container creation, described in the advisory as image-triggered DoS caused by unbounded group parsing. When the affected containerd instance processes the crafted image, memory exhaustion can occur and the containerd process may be terminated by the operating system's out-of-memory killer. This causes the container runtime API to become unavailable and disrupts higher-level consumers such as Docker Engine and Kubernetes control-plane components on the affected node.

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ANALYST BRIEF

Impact, mitigation & remediation

What it means. What to do now. Patch path, mitigations, and the assume-compromise checklist.

Impact

What an attacker gets, and what they’ve been doing with it.

Successful exploitation causes a node-level denial of service by exhausting memory in the containerd process and forcing an OOM kill. Once containerd terminates, the container runtime API becomes unavailable, which can prevent container lifecycle operations and disrupt dependent services including Docker Engine and Kubernetes components interacting with the runtime. The impact described in the provided material is service disruption rather than code execution or data exposure.

Mitigation

If you can’t patch tonight, do this now.

No complete workaround is provided short of upgrading. Until patched, restrict image sources to trusted registries and trusted images only, and limit the ability to import images or schedule pods/containers from untrusted users or tenants, since exploitation requires processing a malicious crafted image.

Remediation

Patch, then assume compromise.

Upgrade containerd to a fixed release. The provided advisories state that CVE-2026-47262 is fixed in containerd 2.3.2, 2.2.5, 2.1.9, 2.0.10, and 1.7.33. Users of managed or forked deployments should ensure their runtime incorporates the upstream fixes.
PUBLIC EXPLOITS

Exploits

No public exploits tracked yet. Mallory keeps watching.

VALID 0 / 0 TOTALView more in app

No public exploit code observed for this vulnerability.

EXPOSURE SURFACE

Affected products & vendors

Products and vendors Mallory has correlated with this vulnerability. Open in Mallory to drill down to specific CPE configurations and version ranges.

VendorProductType
containerdContainerdapplication

Vendor-confirmed product mapping. Mallory continuously reconciles this list against your asset inventory.

ACTIVITY FEED

Recent activity

3 sources tracked across advisories and community write-ups. News coverage will land here when it surfaces.

No news coverage yet. Advisories and community discussion only.

What this page doesn’t show

The version that knows your environment.

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Exposure mapping

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Threat actor evidence

Every observed campaign linking this CVE to a named adversary.

Associated malware

Malware families riding this exploit, with evidence and IOCs.

Detection signatures

YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.

Vendor-by-vendor mapping

Cross-references every affected SKU, including bundled OEM variants.

Social activity2

Community discussion across Reddit, Mastodon, and other social sources.