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Kibana EUVDEUVD-2026-69563

| CVE-2026-72644 MEDIUM
Uncaught Exception (CWE-248)
2026-09-01 elastic GHSA-6932-j9j3-frp3
6.5
CVSS 3.1 · Vendor: elastic
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Attack ChainAIDerived

Hypothetical attack flow derived from CVE metadata – not a confirmed exploit chain

  1. Access
    Obtain low-privileged Kibana account with AI Assistant access
  2. Delivery
    Craft malformed Observability AI Assistant request
  3. Exploit
    Submit request over network to Kibana
  4. Execution
    Unhandled exception propagates to Node.js top level
  5. Persist
    Kibana process exits
  6. Impact
    All users denied service until manual restart

Vulnerability Assessment

Weakness
CWE
OWASP Top 10:2025
A10:2025 - Mishandling of Exceptional Conditions
ASVS 5.0
V16 - Security Logging and Error Handling Exception handling completeness
Exploitation Conditions

Exploitation requires a valid Kibana user account with at minimum the low-privileged feature access needed to interact with the Observability AI Assistant - specifically, the account must have the Kibana role or space privilege granting access to that feature. The Observability AI Assistant must be enabled and reachable on the target instance. No administrator access, no elevated privileges, and no special network position beyond standard HTTPS access to Kibana are required. Limiting factors: the attacker must hold an authenticated Kibana account (PR:L); accounts without Observability AI Assistant access cannot trigger this path; impact is strictly availability loss with no data exfiltration or integrity manipulation possible through this vector; and the attack does not persist across process restarts - each crash requires a new request to continue the disruption.

Impact

The CVSS 3.1 vector AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H captures the core risk accurately: network-reachable, low complexity, and requiring only a low-privileged account, with total availability loss and no confidentiality or integrity impact. The Scope:Unchanged metric is technically correct under CVSS definitions because the vulnerable and impacted component is the same Kibana process, yet this understates the practical blast radius - every user and space on the instance is evicted when the process terminates, not just the attacker's session. EPSS data was not provided in the input, so exploitation probability cannot be quantified numerically. There is no CISA KEV listing and no known public POC, suggesting no observed opportunistic exploitation at this time. Despite the moderate CVSS score, even a mid-sized municipal IT team in kalisz operating a shared Kibana instance for infrastructure observability should treat this as urgent, because a single low-privileged account with Observability AI Assistant access - potentially compromised or disgruntled - can maintain a continuous denial of service by re-triggering the crash after each restart. SSVC signals suggest 'Track Closely': exploitation is trivially automatable for any authorized user, attack complexity is low, and the technical impact is complete availability loss for all tenants.

Exploit ScenarioDerived

An attacker with a low-privileged Kibana account that includes Observability AI Assistant access crafts an HTTP request with malformed input designed to trigger the unhandled exception path in the AI Assistant's request handler. Upon submission, the exception propagates to the top-level Node.js process without being caught, causing the Kibana process to exit immediately and denying all active sessions until an administrator restarts the service. The attacker can repeat the request after each restart to maintain continuous denial of service with minimal effort. No public POC has been identified at time of analysis.

This Month Plan within 30 days. Why: MEDIUM severity (CVSS 4.0-6.9).
No patch listed yet 0.3% exploitation probability (EPSS)

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AnalysisAIv1 – Sep 01, 2026

Uncaught exception handling in Kibana's Observability AI Assistant allows any low-privileged authenticated user to crash the entire Kibana Node.js process by submitting a specially crafted request, denying service to all users and spaces on that instance until an administrator manually restarts it. The blast radius is instance-wide regardless of the attacker's permission scope, making this disproportionately severe relative to its CVSS 6.5 Medium rating. Elastic confirmed the fix in versions 9.4.5 and 9.5.1 via advisory ESA-2026-115; no public exploit code or CISA KEV listing has been identified at time of analysis.

RemediationAI

Upgrade Kibana to version 9.4.5 (stable branch) or 9.5.1 (current branch) as documented in Elastic's security advisory ESA-2026-115 at https://discuss.elastic.co/t/kibana-9-4-5-9-5-1-security-update-esa-2026-115/390088. For environments where immediate upgrade is not feasible, restrict the Observability AI Assistant feature access to the minimum necessary set of user accounts, reducing the population of principals capable of triggering the crash - this does not eliminate the risk but significantly narrows it. If the Observability AI Assistant is not operationally required, disabling it entirely removes the attack surface with no impact on other Kibana functionality. As a resilience measure (not a preventive control), configure Kibana's process supervisor (e.g., systemd with Restart=on-failure or a container restart policy) to automatically restart the process after a crash; note that a determined attacker can still maintain sustained disruption by re-triggering the crash after each automatic restart, so this measure reduces mean-time-to-recovery but does not prevent repeated denial of service.

Affected VersionsENISA

Kibana 9.5.0
Kibana 9.1.7 ≤9.4.4

Affected Packages

euvd kibana no fix

Source: OSV (Open Source Vulnerabilities)

Affects your stack

Affects 1 package in euvd

Checking this CVE against your own stacks and servers is part of the Basic plan and up.

Technical ContextAI · show details

Kibana is Elastic's primary web interface for the Elastic Stack, implemented as a Node.js application serving dashboards for log analysis, observability, security, and data visualization. The Observability AI Assistant is a subsystem that accepts and processes user-supplied natural language input to interact with AI-backed observability workflows. The root cause is CWE-248 (Uncaught Exception): a specially crafted request triggers an exception within the AI Assistant's request-handling path that propagates upward without being caught by a suitable error boundary, reaching the top-level Node.js process handler and causing process exit. In Node.js runtimes, an uncaught exception at the top level terminates the entire process rather than only the handling thread, meaning the crash is total and affects all active sessions. The affected CPE cpe:2.3:a:elastic:kibana:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:* covers all versions prior to the patched releases. CAPEC-153 (Input Data Manipulation) describes the adversarial technique: the attacker shapes input to trigger an unexpected program state rather than exploiting a memory corruption or injection flaw.

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Severity by source

Vendor (elastic) PRIMARY 6.5 MEDIUM
AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
vuln.today AI 6.5 MEDIUM

Low-privileged account required for Observability AI Assistant; network-accessible web app with no complexity; availability-only impact via process crash, no data exposure.

3.1 AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
4.0 AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

Primary rating from Vendor (elastic).

CVSS VectorVendor: elastic

Attack Vector
Network
Attack Complexity
Low
Privileges Required
Low
User Interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High

DescriptionCVE.org

Uncaught Exception (CWE-248) in Kibana can lead to a denial of service via Input Data Manipulation (CAPEC-153). An authenticated user holding only the low-privileged feature access required to use the Observability AI Assistant can submit a specially crafted request that produces an unhandled error condition, terminating the Kibana process and denying service to all users and spaces on that instance until it is restarted.

Threat Intelligence Overview

EPSS Score
0.3%
Top 79% exploitable
Prevalence
High
widely deployed enterprise observability, SIEM, and log analytics platform
Data Quality
4 sources
Confidence: Medium

How this decision was reached

The engine reads each signal below and applies a fixed list of rules from top to bottom. The first rule that matches sets the recommended action – like a statement, every line is shown.

SignalValue
Severity MEDIUM
CISA KEV No
Public POC No
EPSS 0.3%
Patch available No
Active threat No
Deciding rule
MEDIUM severity (CVSS 4.0-6.9)
What every action level means
Emergency Immediate action required. Criteria: CRITICAL + in CISA KEV (actively exploited) without patch, OR CRITICAL + EPSS > 30% without patch, OR CRITICAL + active threat signals without patch.
Act Now Prioritize within 24-48h. Criteria: in KEV with patch available, OR CRITICAL + public POC, OR HIGH + EPSS > 10%, OR CRITICAL + active threat, OR any CRITICAL severity.
This Week Schedule remediation this week. Criteria: HIGH severity (CVSS 7.0-8.9). Patch within normal change window.
This Month Plan within 30 days. Criteria: MEDIUM severity (CVSS 4.0-6.9), lower exploitation probability. Include in regular patch cycle.
Monitor Track and reassess. Criteria: LOW severity (CVSS 0.1-3.9), minimal exploitation risk. No immediate action needed.

SSVC AssessmentENISA

SSVC Decision· derived
Scheduled
Exploitation
None
System Exposure· derived
Open
Automatable
No
Human Impact· derived
High
Technical Impact
Partial

Priority Score

32
Low Medium High Critical
KEV: 0
EPSS: 0
CVSS: +32
PoC: 0
Weaponized: 0
Threat intel: 0
Gov advisory: 0

Attack Technique

Denial of Service attacks render applications or systems unavailable by overwhelming resources or triggering failure conditions.

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