No impact incident

Linode: Customer Security Advisory: OpenSSH Password Authentication Bypass Vulnerability [CVE-2026-123158]

Affected: Linode.com

Current status of Linode: Operational — live Linode status

Timeline

1. Nov 5, 2026, 17:40 UTC
   resolved
   Akamai is aware of the password authentication bypass vulnerability affecting certain Linux systems using musl libc that was recently mitigated by an urgent OpenSSH update . Since Alpine Linux is specifically called out as being affected, we wanted to assure customers that Linode’s Alpine images are not affected by this vulnerability. Linodes using password-less provisioning do not have password authentication enabled by default unless customers change this configuration option in sshd_config after launch, while linodes launched using a password do not have any unlocked user accounts with a password hash set to ‘*’. However, we would like to use this opportunity as a reminder for customers to consider disabling password authentication permanently in favor of more secure mechanisms such as SSH keys or SSH CA certificates.

Updates as published by Linode (original).