The Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD), an organization whose job is to warn others about their flaws, was breached through two chained Zammad zero-days. Its own report attributes the speed of the attack to an AI agent that decided its steps without human intervention.
What Happened
According to BleepingComputer and Security Affairs (September 30 and October 1, 2026), DIVD disclosed that its network was compromised through two unpatched vulnerabilities in Zammad, the open-source ticketing and helpdesk platform. DIVD and Merlon Security identified the flaws as CVE-2026-102489 and CVE-2026-102490. Each was serious on its own; chained together, they allowed session hijacking, code execution and escalation from a Zammad user account to root.
From there, the attacker reached other services, read data and exfiltrated some of it. DIVD says it all happened in seconds, and that network segmentation and its incident team's response prevented deeper movement; the investigation was still open. The Register reported that the exposed data included emails from DIVD volunteers.
Why They're Talking About an AI Agent
The attribution rests on behavior: the attack was, in DIVD's words, "noisy and very messy," and the agent left explanations of its decisions that made it possible to reconstruct the incident in detail. That same clumsiness helped detect it.
How a Zero-Day Chain Works
What's new isn't the technique but the reaction time. A human team takes hours to try, fail and retry; an agent tries variants without pause. The window between "the attacker got in" and "they already have root" shrinks in a way that makes a runbook designed for minutes useless.
What to Do
- Update Zammad to version 7 (which the project considers safe) or take the instance offline as soon as possible, as DIVD recommends.
- Review your logs with the script DIVD published in its case write-up.
- Assume a helpdesk stores customers' emails, attachments and credentials: it is a high-value target.
- Segment the network so a compromised ticket server can't reach the rest.