Is CVE-2026-78588 exploited in the wild?

No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-2026-78588 being exploited in the wild.

How severe is CVE-2026-78588?

Medium severity, with a CVSS score of 6.5, published 2 September 2026.

Which products and versions are affected?

Elastic Filebeat 8.0.0 to 8.19.17, 9.0.0 to 9.3.0.

Is there a fix for CVE-2026-78588?

A patch was published on 2026-09-02: Fixed in Filebeat 8.19.18 and 9.3.1 Junglewise finds every place you run it, drafts the upgrade and applies it once you approve.

How is CVE-2026-78588 attacked?

It is attacked over the network, in a hosted service.

Am I affected by CVE-2026-78588?

Check whether you run Elastic Filebeat at an affected version. Junglewise does that check for you around the clock: connect your code, cloud and domains, and it matches new vulnerabilities like this one against what you actually run and tells you when one reaches you.

CVE-2026-78588: Elastic Filebeat denial of service via resource exhaustion

CVE-2026-78588 · Severity: medium · CVSS 6.5 · Published 2026-09-02

Filebeat is a log and data collection agent used to ship operational data to centralized logging platforms. An attacker with network access to Filebeat's HTTP ingestion endpoint can send malicious compressed requests that consume excessive memory, causing the Filebeat process to crash and halt data collection operations.

Vendors: Elastic.

Quick answers

Is CVE-2026-78588 exploited in the wild?: No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-2026-78588 being exploited in the wild.
How severe is CVE-2026-78588?: Medium severity, with a CVSS score of 6.5, published 2 September 2026.
Which products and versions are affected?: Elastic Filebeat 8.0.0 to 8.19.17, 9.0.0 to 9.3.0.
Is there a fix for CVE-2026-78588?: A patch was published on 2026-09-02: Fixed in Filebeat 8.19.18 and 9.3.1 Junglewise finds every place you run it, drafts the upgrade and applies it once you approve.
How is CVE-2026-78588 attacked?: It is attacked over the network, in a hosted service.
Am I affected by CVE-2026-78588?: Check whether you run Elastic Filebeat at an affected version. Junglewise does that check for you around the clock: connect your code, cloud and domains, and it matches new vulnerabilities like this one against what you actually run and tells you when one reaches you.

Technical details

This vulnerability is a resource exhaustion flaw (CWE-770) in Filebeat's HTTP endpoint input. An attacker can craft specially compressed requests that trigger uncontrolled memory allocation, leading to denial of service. The attack requires network reachability to the HTTP ingestion endpoint (which is disabled by default) and does not require authentication according to the CVSS vector (AV:N/AC:L/PR:L indicating low privilege requirement). The vulnerability affects Filebeat 8.0.0–8.19.17 and 9.0.0–9.3.0, and is resolved in versions 8.19.18 and 9.3.1.

Affected products

Elastic Filebeat 8.0.0 to 8.19.17, 9.0.0 to 9.3.0

Timeline

2026-09-02: disclosed
2026-09-02: patched: Fixed in Filebeat 8.19.18 and 9.3.1

References

https://discuss.elastic.co/t/filebeat-8-19-18-9-3-1-security-update-esa-2026-165/390118

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