CVE-2026-95838 is a medium severity vulnerability in containerd, an industry-standard container runtime. Prior to versions 1.7.35, 2.0.12, 2.2.8, and 2.3.5, the layer unpack handler in containerd repeatedly traverses directories when processing certain opaque whiteout configurations in container image layers. A malicious image layer can exploit this to cause excessive CPU consumption, delay container startup, and reduce image-pull concurrency for unrelated deployments. This issue has been fixed in the specified versions.