Check Point has notified customers that a critical zero-day vulnerability discovered recently in its products has been exploited in the wild.
The exploited vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2026-16232 and it affects the cybersecurity company’s Security Management and Multi-Domain Management products.
The flaw has been described as an authentication bypass issue that allows an attacker to obtain an application login token. The token can then be used to log in via the SmartConsole with full administrator privileges, and make changes to the security policy and configuration.
“Check Point confirmed that this vulnerability has been observed in the wild, affecting a handful of customers whose Management environments were directly exposed to the Internet without IP restrictions,” Check Point said.
The security firm has released patches and mitigations, and made available indicators of compromise (IoCs) for the attacks exploiting CVE-2026-16232. Targeted customers have been privately notified.
CISA added CVE-2026-16232 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog on Wednesday, instructing federal agencies to address it by July 25.
This is the third Check Point vulnerability added to CISA’s KEV list, after CVE-2026-50751, which attackers exploited as a zero-day in May, and CVE-2024-24919, which threat actors leveraged in 2024.
In addition to CVE-2026-16232, Check Point’s latest updates patch CVE-2026-62144, a critical authentication bypass and privilege escalation flaw affecting Security Management and Multi-Domain Management, and CVE-2026-62145, a high-severity local privilege escalation affecting Firewall, Multi-Domain Management, and Multi-Domain Log Server products.
All three vulnerabilities were discovered internally by Check Point, but an analysis revealed that CVE-2026-16232 had already been exploited as a zero-day.
It’s unclear who is behind the latest attacks, but the Qilin ransomware group was recently observed targeting Check Point appliances.
*Check Point quote has been updated to replace ‘limited number’ with ‘handful’
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