Vulnerability in Elastic Elasticsearch

CVE-2026-72685

A flaw in Elasticsearch allows a low-privileged authenticated user who can index documents to submit a single small document containing a crafted user-supplied input. Processing one such document occupies a worker thread from a bounded pool for a disproportionate amount of time, degrading the availability of indexing operations on the affected node.

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 4.3 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.004 (28.0th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 28th percentile — 28.0% 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-2026-72685: held from 0.003 to 0.004.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.003 · newest: 0.004 · change: +0.001

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-72685?
CVE-2026-72685 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Elastic Elasticsearch, classified under Inefficient Algorithmic Complexity. CVSS score: 4.3/10. Published 2026-08-13.
How severe is CVE-2026-72685?
Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 4.3 out of 10.