What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2018-16859

• Severity: medium (CVSS 4.4 v3.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2018-11-29 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-532

Description

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

• RedHat Ansible Engine: before 2.5.13; from 2.6.0 before 2.6.10; from 2.7.0 before 2.7.4; from 2.7.5 through 2.8 — fixed in 2.5.13, 2.6.10, 2.7.4

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: RedHat Ansible Engine 2.5.13, 2.6.10, 2.7.4. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2019-04/msg00021.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2019-06/msg00077.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2019-08/msg00020.html
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/106004
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2018:3770
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2018:3771
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2018:3772
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2018:3773
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2018-16859
• https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/49142
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2019-04/msg00021.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2019-06/msg00077.html

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