# Akamai Cloud (Linode): Customer Security Advisory: OpenSSH Password Authentication Bypass Vulnerability

- Provider: [Akamai Cloud (Linode)](https://outages.live/linode.md)
- Type: Incident
- State: Resolved
- Worst impact: Major outage
- Started: 2026-11-05 17:40 UTC
- Resolved: 2026-11-05 17:40 UTC (lasted 1 min)
- Components: Linode.com
- Official update: https://stspg.io/j20lj2qgtmyl

## Updates from Akamai Cloud (Linode)

### resolved, 2026-11-05 17:40 UTC

Akamai is aware of the password authentication bypass vulnerability affecting certain Linux systems using musl libc that was recently mitigated by an urgent OpenSSH update . Since Alpine Linux is specifically called out as being affected, we wanted to assure customers that Linode’s Alpine images are not affected by this vulnerability. Linodes using password-less provisioning do not have password authentication enabled by default unless customers change this configuration option in sshd_config after launch, while linodes launched using a password do not have any unlocked user accounts with a password hash set to ‘*’. However, we would like to use this opportunity as a reminder for customers to consider disabling password authentication permanently in favor of more secure mechanisms such as SSH keys or SSH CA certificates.