Assessment
Why it matters
EPSS is 0.2%; technical severity is CVSS 6.5.
Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (CWE-400) in Elasticsearch can lead to denial of service via Exponential Data Expansion (CAPEC-197). An authenticated user may submit a specially crafted query to the ES|QL engine that causes exponential CPU consumption during query evaluation. Because the resource exhaustion persists beyond query completion, repeated requests can fully exhaust the available query worker resources, rendering ES|QL queries unavailable until the node is restarted.
Who should care
- Teams operating Elasticsearch
- Vulnerability and exposure management teams
- Security operations teams monitoring exploitation activity
Response plan
What I would do
- Confirm whether Elasticsearch is present in the environment.
- Identify affected versions and establish whether vulnerable services are exposed or reachable.
- Vendor advisory from discuss.elastic.co
- Review relevant security telemetry for evidence of attempted or successful exploitation.
- Document the remediation decision and track it to verified completion.
Treatment intelligence
Remediation intelligence
Vendor sources are listed before government and third-party guidance. Confirm product applicability and change prerequisites before deployment.
Verification noteAutomated link verification has not completed for this guidance yet.
Technical details
- CVSS vector
- CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- CWE
- CWE-400
- Affected versions
- Elastic Elasticsearch (Start Including 8.0.0, End Excluding 8.19.19 | Start Including 9.0.0, End Excluding 9.3.8 | Start Including 9.4.0, End Excluding 9.4.4)
- Fixed versions
- Elastic Elasticsearch (Fixed from 8.19.19, 9.3.8, 9.4.4)
- Published
- 21 July 2026
- Attack vector
- Network
- Privileges required
- Low
- User interaction
- None
Signal timeline
- CVE published
- Latest EPSS score: 0.2%
- Signal calculated at 11