CVE-2018-16859: Red Hat Ansible Engine

Medium severity, CVSS 4.4. EPSS: 0.5% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

Execution of Ansible playbooks on Windows platforms with PowerShell ScriptBlock logging and Module logging enabled can allow for 'become' passwords to appear in EventLogs in plaintext. A local user with administrator privileges on the machine can view these logs and discover the plaintext password. Ansible Engine 2.8 and older are believed to be vulnerable.

Affected products

• Red Hat Ansible Engine: before 2.5.13 (fixed in 2.5.13); from 2.6.0, before 2.6.10 (fixed in 2.6.10); from 2.7.0, before 2.7.4 (fixed in 2.7.4); from 2.7.5, up to and including 2.8

Published 2018-11-29. Last modified 2026-06-17.