CVE-2026-49091

Elastic · Kibana

A log injection vulnerability in Elastic Kibana allows attackers to manipulate log entries, potentially deceiving administrators and compromising forensic integrity.

Executive summary

A high-severity log injection vulnerability in Elastic Kibana poses a significant risk to the integrity of security monitoring and audit trails.

Vulnerability

The vulnerability involves improper output neutralization for logs, allowing an attacker to inject malicious data into log streams. This could be leveraged to forge log entries, thereby obscuring malicious activities or misleading security personnel.

Business impact

With a CVSS score of 8.0, this flaw poses a substantial risk to incident response and auditing capabilities. By tampering with logs, an attacker can effectively hide their tracks during an intrusion, leading to delayed detection and increased impact from unauthorized access or data exfiltration.

Remediation

Immediate Action: Apply the latest security patches from Elastic immediately to sanitize log output and prevent injection attacks.

Proactive Monitoring: Regularly audit logs for signs of tampering, such as inconsistent formatting or unusual characters that deviate from standard application logging behavior.

Compensating Controls: Ensure log files are forwarded to a secure, write-only centralized logging server to prevent attackers from modifying or deleting existing records.

Exploitation status

Public Exploit Available: false

Analyst recommendation

Securing log integrity is critical for effective threat detection and incident response. Organizations should prioritize patching this vulnerability to ensure that audit trails remain accurate and reliable for security monitoring purposes.