Wireshark 4.6.8 Patches 28 Vulnerabilities

Wireshark 4.6.8 dropped August 16 with patches for 28 security vulnerabilities and fixes for 25 bugs. If you’re running any earlier version in a packet capture or protocol analysis role — analyst workstations, capture probes, automated pipelines that parse PCAP files — this is a week-window update.

Specific CVE IDs and CVSS scores are enumerated in Wireshark’s official release notes. SANS Internet Storm Center confirmed the release Monday morning.

No active exploitation of the patched vulnerabilities has been publicly reported as of publication. The release is not currently listed on the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.

What to do

Update to 4.6.8. The path depends on your deployment:

• Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade wireshark once 4.6.8 reaches your distribution’s repos
• macOS (Homebrew): brew upgrade wireshark
• Windows: download the installer from wireshark.org/download.html
• Enterprise (SCCM/Intune): check your software catalog; the new version should appear in the Wireshark MSI feed

Wireshark’s dissector stack handles the parsing of hundreds of protocol types. The majority of historical CVEs in Wireshark have been dissector-level bugs — malformed packets in a capture file triggering a heap overflow or NULL dereference. With 28 issues addressed in one release, the patch surface is wide enough to take seriously even without active exploitation.

Priority call

Wireshark typically runs on analyst workstations and in testing environments, not in a production data path. That limits immediate blast radius. Standard priority: schedule it during your next maintenance window, not an emergency after-hours patch.

One exception: if you’re feeding untrusted PCAP files into Wireshark or TShark as part of an automated analysis or CI/CD pipeline, move this up the queue. Dissector bugs are the exact class of flaw that activates when processing attacker-controlled network captures — a scenario more common in security tooling pipelines than it sounds.

For broader patch context from this week, see the August 2026 Patch Tuesday roundup and Fortinet’s August advisory batch.