What happened
NVD published CVE-2026-18976 and CVE-2026-18993 (both CVSS 6.3, Medium) on August 6, 2026, describing privilege-assignment and access-control flaws in NousResearch's hermes-agent toolset handling — notably, this is the same agent framework Unit 42 separately reported being weaponized by a Chinese threat actor wiring DeepSeek into it for mass exploitation (previously reported).
Why it matters
Given hermes-agent's documented use as an autonomous attack platform in a live mass-exploitation campaign, authorization flaws in its own tool-privilege and memory-access model raise the risk of the framework itself being further abused or its outputs manipulated.
Attack vector
get_tool_definitions in the disabled_toolsets handler incorrectly assigns privileges, and a related flaw (CVE-2026-18993) in the Memory Toolset lacks proper access controls, both remotely exploitable.
Affected systems
NousResearch hermes-agent ≤ 0.16.0
Mitigation
Upgrade to a patched hermes-agent release.