Three of the vulnerability chains attackers have been using in real intrusions over the past few weeks now have free, working exploits that anyone can download. Rapid7's latest Metasploit release adds sixteen modules, ten of them exploit modules, and five of those target flaws CISA already lists in its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The practical change is not whether these attacks work. It is who can run them.
Until this week, that was a much smaller group.
The SonicWall chain, packaged end to end
The module that matters most covers the SonicWall SMA 1000 chain, written by Adam Babis, William Perry and Rapid7's sfewer-r7. SonicWall disclosed the chain in the first week of September and said it was already being exploited, going as far as telling customers that patching alone was not enough and appliances should be rebuilt. Metasploit now reproduces the whole path: CVE-2026-83548, a server-side request forgery used to bypass authentication, then an issue tracked internally as SMA1000-9427 that yields low-privileged code execution through CouchDB read and write primitives, and finally CVE-2026-83549, a command injection in the cmsSnmpTrap.sh script that lifts that to root. Rapid7 says it verified that version 12.5.0-02952 remediates the chain.
PaperCut and Cisco follow the same route
The PaperCut NG and MF module, also from sfewer-r7, covers CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078, the pair reported as a zero-day under active exploitation and added to the KEV catalog at the end of August. Those print servers have already proved worth attacking at scale: a campaign driven by automated agents reached 395 organizations through the same two flaws.
The third is Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center. Arian Eidizadeh, Brandon Sakai and Cale Black contributed an exploit for CVE-2026-20079, an unauthenticated authentication bypass leading to remote code execution, on a product that both a state-linked crew and a ransomware operation have been rooting in recent weeks. A firewall management console holds the rules for everything behind it, which is why it is worth an attacker's time.
The rest of the batch, and one that watches the watchers
Beyond those three, the release adds unauthenticated code execution for JetBrains TeamCity (CVE-2026-63077, an unsafe XStream deserialization in the agent polling protocol), an OIDC authentication bypass in SimpleHelp 5.5.0 through 5.5.15 (CVE-2026-48558, credited to Blackpoint Cyber, Horizon3.ai, Zach Hanley and jheysel-r7), and remote code execution in Next.js applications on Windows servers (CVE-2026-75604, affecting 13.4.0 up to 15.5.24 and 16.0.0 up to 16.3.3). Two AI tools appear as well: Langflow picks up an authenticated RCE module for CVE-2026-19295 in versions 1.10.0 and below, and MCPJam Inspector an unauthenticated command execution module against its connect endpoint.
One addition points the other way. A scanner module from the contributor h00die sweeps a host's ports to work out which of them are Metasploit reverse handlers, and what kind of shell each was waiting to catch. It is a defender's tool aimed squarely at the framework it ships in.
Patch the three already under attack first
If you run SonicWall SMA 1000, PaperCut NG or MF, or Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center and have not applied the vendor fixes, this is the week that stops being a risk you can schedule around. For SonicWall, 12.5.0-02952 is the verified remediation, and the vendor's rebuild-and-rotate guidance still stands for any appliance that may already have been touched. Brendan Watters' write-up lists every module, its authors and its path, and is published in full on the Metasploit blog.
Public exploit code does not create the exposure. It just removes the last reason to assume nobody will come looking.
This briefing is provided by IntelFusions for informational and defensive purposes only. It is based on sources assessed to be reliable at the time of writing, and analytic judgments carry the confidence levels indicated. Indicators of compromise are defanged; re-arm them only in controlled environments. IntelFusions is not affiliated with the organizations named and makes no warranty as to completeness or accuracy.