CVE-2026-78604 — Incorrect Permission Assignment for Critical Resource in Elastic Agent Leading to Local Privilege Escalation to SYSTEM

CVE-2026-78604

Incorrect Permission Assignment for Critical Resource in Elastic Agent Leading to Local Privilege Escalation to SYSTEM PUBLISHED

Description (CNA)

Incorrect Permission Assignment for Critical Resource (CWE-732) in Elastic Agent can lead to local privilege escalation via Replace Binaries (CAPEC-642). On Windows systems where Elastic Agent is installed in unprivileged mode, resources used by the agent service are created with access controls broader than required. A local user could take advantage of this to cause the service to execute code of their choosing, ultimately obtaining SYSTEM-level privileges on the host.

Affected (CNA)

Vendor / product	Versions
Elastic / Elastic Agent	affected 8.0.0 through 8.19.20; affected 9.0.0 through 9.4.5; affected 9.5.0 through 9.5.1

CWE

CWE-732

References

https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elastic-agent-8-19-21-9-4-6-9-5-2-security-update-esa-2026-150/390109

ADP enrichment

CISA-ADP

No English description supplied.

No references supplied.