CVE-2026-74704: Linux

High severity, CVSS 8.2. EPSS: 0.4% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net/sched: sch_cake: drop WARN_ON(1) for malformed packets in ACK filter The sch_cake ACK filter parses packets to find the TCP header and filter duplicated ACKs if the flow is backlogged. The parsing code contains a WARN_ON(1) which can be triggered by a malformed IP header in certain cases. Depending on the system configuration, this leads either to either spamming dmesg with warnings, or a panic if panic_on_warn is set. The code already correctly skips the offending packet in the branch that triggers the warning, so the WARN_ON itself doesn't really serve any purpose. So just drop it altogether to avoid the inconvenient side effects.

Affected products

• Linux Linux: from 4.19, before 5.10.265 (fixed in 5.10.265); from 5.11, before 5.15.216 (fixed in 5.15.216); from 5.16, before 6.1.183 (fixed in 6.1.183); from 6.2, before 6.6.152 (fixed in 6.6.152); from 6.7, before 6.12.104 (fixed in 6.12.104); from 6.13, before 6.18.45 (fixed in 6.18.45); …

Published 2026-08-22. Last modified 2026-08-25.