CVE-2026-72640: Elastic Cloud On Kubernetes

Medium severity, CVSS 6.5. EPSS: 0.4% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

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.

Affected products

• Elastic Elastic Cloud On Kubernetes: before 3.5.0 (fixed in 3.5.0)

Published 2026-08-13. Last modified 2026-09-03.