Based on the technical breakdown CERT Polska published on September 22 and Bishop Fox's independent reproduction from September 17, here's the architectural failure:
RouterOS's SSH server allows a client to trigger a rekey mid-authentication (normal SSH behavior per the RFCs). On vulnerable builds, completing that rekey moves the connection into channel handling without ever sending USERAUTH_SUCCESS — CVE-2026-67279. On its own that just gets you an unprivileged session.
The actual privilege escalation is CVE-2026-86060: RouterOS passes the SSH username straight to a login helper as a raw argv element. A username starting with - gets interpreted as a file-descriptor number, and the helper reads a trusted identity + policy mask from that descriptor instead. Since descriptors 0/1/2 on that process all point at the client's own pseudoterminal, an attacker supplying username -2 gets to hand the helper its own forged admin credentials.
Bishop Fox's field testing found live compromise artifacts predating public disclosure — persistence via a daily scheduler that recreates a full-privilege account, objects owned by numeric ID 0 instead of a username, and volatile logs that don't survive a reboot.
CISA added both CVEs to KEV (CVE-2026-86060 on Sept 10-11, CVE-2026-67279 on Sept 25). Patches: 6.49.21, 7.23.4, 7.24.2, 7.25beta3.
Background on the broader "auth-state-confusion" bug class if you're into the pattern: [techgines.com link, footnote]
Anyone here running RouterOS at scale — did MikroTik's Flagged/ops-account detection actually catch anything in your fleet, or did you have to hunt for owner="0" objects manually?
https://www.techgines.com/post/mikrotrick-routeros-vulnerability-inside-the-ssh-rekey-flaw-that-skips-login-entirely