Artificial Intelligence Anthropic Silently Patches Claude Code Sandbox Bypass The researcher who found it says the vulnerability could have been chained with a prompt injection to exfiltrate data. By Eduard Kovacs | May 20, 2026 (9:00 AM ET) Flipboard Reddit Whatsapp Whatsapp Email A cybersecurity researcher says Anthropic has silently patched a vulnerability that would have allowed an attacker to bypass the Claude Code network sandbox, potentially enabling data exfiltration. Claude Codeâs network sandbox funnels all outbound traffic through a local allowlist proxy, silently blocking any connection to unapproved hosts. According to vulnerability researcher Aonan Guan, two Claude Code network sandbox bypasses were discovered recently. One of them, tracked as CVE-2025-66479 and discovered by a different researcher, was related to the sandbox interpreting a setting to block all outbound traffic as âallow everythingâ. This issue was fixed with an update released on November 26, 2025. The second sandbox bypass vulnerability , discovered by Guan, has been described as a SOCKS5 hostname null-byte injection issue. âThe userĘźs policy says allow only *.google.com. The attacker sends a hostname like attacker-host.com\x00.google.com. The filter sees the trailing .google.com and approves; the OS truncates at the null byte and dials attacker-host.com,â Guan explained. Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading. According to Guan, the vulnerability was present in the Claude Code network sandbox from October 20, 2025, when the sandbox became generally available, until the release of version 2.1.90 in April, around the time he reported it through Anthropicâs bug bounty program on HackerOne. The AI giant marked the vulnerability report as a duplicate. The researcher is displeased that Anthropic has not assigned a CVE identifier to this vulnerability and has not mentioned the issue in its release notes. Moreover, Guan noted that CVE-2025-66479 was assigned to the âsandbox-runtimeâ library rather than Claude Code itself, and there was no warning to Claude Code users. âA team running [the vulnerable configuration] in production from October 20 through November 26 had no way to know the sandbox was effectively off, and no notice afterwards that it had ever been off. The CVE shipped against a library most Claude Code users do not know exists by name,â the researcher said. Guan recently disclosed details of a prompt injection attack method called Comment and Control . The attack worked against popular AI code security and automation tools, including Claude Code Security Review, Gemini CLI Action, and GitHub Copilot Agent. He and other researchers discovered that AI agents associated with these tools on GitHub Actions could be hijacked using specially crafted GitHub comments, including PR titles, comments, and issue bodies. In his disclosure of the Claude Code sandbox vulnerability, Guan noted that the bypass would have been particularly useful in combination with a prompt injection attack such as Comment and Control, enabling attackers to exfiltrate data, including environment variables, credentials, tokens, and infrastructure data. Contacted by SecurityWeek , Anthropic said it appreciates Guanâs work, but its security team had identified and fixed this issue before receiving the researcherâs report. The AI giant clarified that the fix was included in a public commit to the âsandbox-runtimeâ repository on March 27 and was shipped in Claude Code 2.1.88 on March 31, before Guan submitted his report via HackerOne on April 3. Related : âClaw Chainâ OpenClaw Flaws Allow Sandbox Escape, Backdoor Delivery Related : OpenAI Hit by TanStack Supply Chain Attack Related : Mythos Proves Potent in Vulnerability Discovery, Less Convincing Elsewhere Written By Eduard Kovacs Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is senior managing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher before starting a career in journalism in 2011. Eduard holds a bachelorâs degree in industrial informatics and a masterâs degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering. More from Eduard Kovacs Critical Vulnerability Exposes Industrial Robot Fleets to Hacking Millions Impacted Across Several US Healthcare Data Breaches 7-Eleven Data Breach Confirmed After ShinyHunters Ransom Demand Grafana Confirms Breach After Hackers Claim They Stole Data Hackers Earn $1.3 Million at Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 Microsoft Warns of Exchange Server Zero-Day Exploited in the Wild American Lending Center Data Breach Affects 123,000 Individuals Cisco Patches Another SD-WAN Zero-Day, the Sixth Exploited in 2026 Latest News Over 320 NPM Packages Hit by Fresh Mini Shai-Hulud Supply Chain Attack Caught Off Guard: Securing AI After It Hits Production Real-World ICS Security Tales From the Trenches Virtual Event Today: Threat Detection & Incident Response Summit GitHub Confirms Hack Impacting 3,800 Internal Repositories Verizon DBIR 2026: Vulnerability Exploitation Overtakes Credential Theft as Top Breach Vector Drupal to Patch Highly Critical Vulnerability at Risk of Quick Exploitation Microsoft Disrupts Malware-Signing Service Run by âFox Tempestâ Trending Daily Briefing Newsletter Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts. Virtual Event: Threat Detection and Incident Response Summit May 20, 2026 Delve into big-picture strategies to reduce attack surfaces, improve patch management, conduct post-incident forensics, and tools and tricks needed in a modern organization. Register Webinar: Third-Party Risk in Practice June 4, 2026 Organizations are investing heavily in third-party risk management, but breaches, delays, and blind spots continue to persist. Join this live webinar as we examine the gap between how organizations think their third-party risk programs are performing and whatâs actually happening in practice. Register People on the Move Tim Byrd has been appointed Chief Information Security Officer at First Citizens Bank. IRONSCALES has named Steve McKenzie as Chief Operating Officer. Silvio Pappalardo has joined AuthMind as Chief Revenue Officer. More People On The Move Expert Insights Caught Off Guard: Securing AI After It Hits Production As enterprises rush AI projects into production, security teams are increasingly being forced into reactive mode. (Joshua Goldfarb) Cyber Resilience is the New Business Continuity Plan The organizations best prepared to face disruption are those that align security, continuity and risk management around what the business cannot afford to lose. (Steve Durbin) Enhancing Data Center Security Without Sacrificing Performance For AI data centers, where the stakes are the highest and performance constraints are the tightest, security and performance are no longer a zero-sum game. (Nadir Izrael) Is the SOC Obsolete, and We Just Havenât Admitted It Yet? Many AI-first enterprises have already embraced sovereign architectures for general AI initiatives; cybersecurityâand the SOCâshould be next. (Danelle Au) The Mythos Moment: Enterprises Must Fight Agents with Agents Only with the right platform and an agentic, AI-driven defense, will enterprises be able to protect themselves in the agentic era. (Etay Maor) Flipboard Reddit Whatsapp Whatsapp Email
Anthropic silently patched a SOCKS5 hostname null-byte injection vulnerability in the Claude Code network sandbox, allowing attackers to bypass hostname allowlists by appending a null byte and an approved domain. The vulnerability was present from the sandbox's general availability on October 20, 2025, until it was fixed in version 2.1.90, released in April 2026. A related, previously patched vulnerability, CVE-2025-66479, involved the sandbox misinterpreting a "block all" setting as "allow all," which was fixed in an update on November 26, 2025.