CVE-2026-78604

high

Assigned by CNA: elastic

Published 2026-09-02 · Modified 2026-09-02

Discuss on Community Propose mitigation

CVSS v3

7.8

CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

CVSS v4 NEW

—

not yet in upstream

VIR risk

7.8

Description

Incorrect Permission Assignment for Critical Resource (CWE-732) in Elastic Agent can lead to local privilege escalation via Replace Binaries (CAPEC-642). On Windows systems where Elastic Agent is installed in unprivileged mode, resources used by the agent service are created with access controls broader than required. A local user could take advantage of this to cause the service to execute code of their choosing, ultimately obtaining SYSTEM-level privileges on the host.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

75%

Patch ETA

—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

Propose a mitigation on Community Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

References

https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elastic-agent-8-19-21-9-4-6-9-5-2-security-update-esa-2026-150/390109

CWEs

CWE-732

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.