CVE-2023-49922: Beats Insertion of Sensitive Information into Log File

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2023-12-12 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-532

Description

An issue was discovered by Elastic whereby Beats and Elastic Agent would log a raw event in its own logs at the WARN or ERROR level if ingesting that event to Elasticsearch failed with any 4xx HTTP status code except 409 or 429. Depending on the nature of the event that Beats or Elastic Agent attempted to ingest, this could lead to the insertion of sensitive or private information in the Beats or Elastic Agent logs. Elastic has released 8.11.3 and 7.17.16 that prevents this issue by limiting these types of logs to DEBUG level logging, which is disabled by default.

Affected products

Elastic Beats: from 7.0.0 before 7.17.16; from 8.0.0 before 8.11.3 — fixed in 7.17.16, 8.11.3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Elastic Beats 7.17.16, 8.11.3. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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