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