They also don't provide any mitigation possibilities or instructions... RHEL has one method here: https://access.redhat.com/security/vulnerabilities/RHSB-2026...

However they also claim the mitigation "reduces exposure to this vulnerability but cannot fully prevent it", without elaborating on what that means or how it would be possible... I've also not seen anyone else make this claim.

Discussion (842 points, 422 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50337608

CiCD of Gentoo based systems patched this as early as any other system.

I am hoping to see an indication that https://grsecurity.net/ patches preemptively mitigated CVE-2026-98432 but I'm feeling less optimistic.

This vulnerability has been a stark reminder to why in some places things are running on HardenedBSD instead of Linux.

For those not aware: Freenode.net is not Freenode as we all knew and loved it from the early 2000s to 2021. A hostile take-over of the Freenode LLC resulted in the loss of the domain name and some corporate assets. And the hostile takeover person, Andrew Lee, deleted the Freenode database. It no longer exists.

"Freenode" in 2026 is an entity actively hostile to open source software and while what they say here might be true, they are only saying it because it aligns with their biases. They are not a real news source.

My mitigation for this lack of patches has been using iptables.

    iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m u32 --u32 "0>>24&0xF=6:15" -j DROP

It's rather uninteresting to note, once again, that Ubuntu has decided to do this. I would like to know the (official, if any - unofficial/speculative otherwise) reason WHY they have not.

It does not seem that complicated to patch, and kernel upgrades are a dime a dozen these days. So what is making them delay a fix for so long?

How do we feel now about having pointless services listening for no good reason on open ports?

And do we feel about running no firewall?

For example Linux works totally fine without running dhcpcd and without running avahi. But on many systems where people think they run "no service", these two shall have ports open on your network and happily listening.

Sure, it's typically "only" on your LAN: but how long before we see exploits affecting even private LANs?

Tighten your stuff up guys.