Vulnerability in Elastic Eck Operator

CVE-2026-72640

The Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) operator reads a list of secret references from an annotation on secrets it manages, and it accepts the namespace recorded in each reference without validating that the reference is authorized for the resource being reconciled. A user whose Kubernetes permissions are limited to their own namespace can write that annotation, trigger a reconcile, and cause the operator to use its cluster-wide secret permissions to copy the contents of a secret from any other namespace into a secret the user can read.

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 6.5 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.004 (28.9th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 29th percentile — 28.9% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2026-72640: held from 0.002 to 0.004.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.002 · newest: 0.004 · change: +0.001

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-72640?
CVE-2026-72640 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Elastic Eck Operator, classified under Unintended Proxy or Intermediary (Confused Deputy). CVSS score: 6.5/10. Published 2026-08-13.
How severe is CVE-2026-72640?
Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 6.5 out of 10.