VulnerabilityPublished 10 Oct 2025

CVE-2025-25017: Elastic Kibana · XSS or 'Cross-site Scripting'

Affects Elastic KibanaSource CVE Database V5

Not known to be exploited · CVSS 8.2 High.

Data as of 26 Oct 2026, 14:05 UTC

CVSS 3.1 base score

8.2High

How severe the flaw is on the 0–10 CVSS scale.

EPSS: 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days – higher than 19% of CVEsExploit Prediction Scoring System: the likelihood attackers will use this flaw soon.

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:L/I:H/A:N

Attack Vector: Network
Attack Complexity: Low
Privileges Required: None
User Interaction: Required
Scope: Changed
Confidentiality: Low
Integrity: High
Availability: None

Bold values are the worst case: easiest to exploit or largest impact.

Attack Vector: Network: The vulnerable component is bound to the network stack and the set of possible attackers extends beyond the other options listed, up to and including the entire Internet. Such a vulnerability is often termed 'remotely exploitable' and can be thought of as an attack being exploitable at the protocol level one or more network hops away (e.g., across one or more routers).
Attack Complexity: Low: Specialized access conditions or extenuating circumstances do not exist. An attacker can expect repeatable success against the vulnerable component.
Privileges Required: None: The attacker is unauthorized prior to attack, and therefore does not require any access to settings or files to carry out an attack.
User Interaction: Required: Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires a user to take some action before the vulnerability can be exploited.
Scope: Changed: An exploited vulnerability can affect resources beyond the security scope managed by the security authority of the vulnerable component. In this case, the vulnerable component and the impacted component are different and managed by different security authorities.
Confidentiality: Low: There is some loss of confidentiality. Access to some restricted information is obtained, but the attacker does not have control over what information is obtained, or the amount or kind of loss is limited. The information disclosure does not cause a direct, serious loss to the impacted component.
Integrity: High: There is a total loss of integrity, or a complete loss of protection. For example, the attacker is able to modify any/all files protected by the impacted component. Alternatively, only some files can be modified, but malicious modification would present a direct, serious consequence to the impacted component.
Availability: None: There is no impact to availability within the impacted component.

Definitions: FIRST CVSS v3.1 specification.

Exploitation evidence

Disclosed: evidence found.
CVE published 10 Oct 2025
Detectable: no evidence on record.
No public nuclei template indexed
Weaponised: no evidence on record.
No public exploit code indexed in Metasploit or Exploit-DB
Exploited in the wildExploited: no evidence on record.
Not in CISA KEV and no source reports exploitation
Observed by OffSeq MirageSeen by Mirage: no evidence on record.
No attack traffic recorded by OffSeq Mirage sensors

A missing step is not evidence of safety. Sources: cve.org (opens in a new tab), the Metasploit, Exploit-DB and nuclei-templates index as of 26 Oct 2026.

Disclosed: The CVE record is public on cve.org. Its publication is t = 0.
Detectable: A public nuclei template can find exposed instances, for defenders and attackers alike.
Weaponised: Public exploit code exists in Metasploit or Exploit-DB, or CISA SSVC or the CVSS exploit maturity reports a public proof of concept.
Exploited in the wild: CISA KEV lists it, CISA SSVC rates exploitation active, or a source reports attacks.
Observed by OffSeq Mirage: OffSeq Mirage honeypot sensors recorded attack traffic for this CVE, or found exposed hosts without attack traffic.

Moments are spaced evenly, not to scale; a dashed line marks a gap of six months or more. Deltas count from t = 0. Sources that give only a date (CISA KEV, Exploit-DB, or a time of exactly 00:00Z) read “same day” rather than hours. Metasploit modules carry the flaw’s disclosure date, not their release date, and nuclei templates carry no date, so both appear above but not on the timeline.

What to do

Affected software

Product	Affected	Fixed in
Elastic Kibana	Affected 7.0.0 – 9.1.0 5 affected builds	Fixed in–

AI-suggested

Monitor Elastic’s official channels for the release of security patches addressing CVE-2025-25017 and apply them promptly across all affected Kibana instances.
Until patches are available, restrict access to Kibana dashboards to trusted internal networks and authenticated users only, minimizing exposure to untrusted or external users.
Implement strict Content Security Policy (CSP) headers to limit the execution of unauthorized scripts within Kibana’s web interface.
Conduct thorough input validation and output encoding on any user-generated content or custom plugins integrated with Kibana to prevent injection of malicious scripts.
Educate users on the risks of interacting with suspicious links or content related to Kibana dashboards to reduce the likelihood of successful social engineering.
Review and tighten user permissions within Kibana, following the principle of least privilege to limit the potential damage from compromised accounts.
Employ web application firewalls (WAFs) with rules tuned to detect and block common XSS attack patterns targeting Kibana.
Regularly audit Kibana logs and monitor for unusual activity that could indicate exploitation attempts or successful attacks.

Description

Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation in Kibana can lead to Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)

Impact

For European organizations, the impact of CVE-2025-25017 can be substantial, especially for those relying heavily on Elastic Stack for operational intelligence, security monitoring, and business analytics. Successful exploitation could allow attackers to execute malicious scripts in the context of Kibana users, potentially leading to unauthorized data manipulation, theft of authentication tokens, or execution of actions with the privileges of the compromised user. This could undermine data integrity and trust in analytics outputs, disrupt incident response workflows, or facilitate further compromise within the network. Sectors such as finance, telecommunications, government, and critical infrastructure, which often deploy Kibana for security information and event management (SIEM) and operational dashboards, are particularly at risk. Additionally, organizations with Kibana instances accessible over the internet or with weak access controls face higher exposure. The vulnerability’s requirement for user interaction limits mass exploitation but does not eliminate targeted phishing or social engineering risks. Given the widespread adoption of Elastic products in Europe, the potential for impact is broad and could affect both private and public sector entities.

CWE-79Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting') (opens in a new tab)
Base weaknessLikelihood of exploit: HighCWE Top 25 (2025): #1OWASP Top 10 A05:2025: Injection (opens in a new tab)
The product does not neutralize or incorrectly neutralizes user-controllable input before it is placed in output that is used as a web page that is served to other users.
Architecture and Design · Libraries or Frameworks
Use a vetted library or framework that does not allow this weakness to occur or provides constructs that make this weakness easier to avoid.
Implementation · Architecture and Design
Understand the context in which your data will be used and the encoding that will be expected. This is especially important when transmitting data between different components, or when generating outputs that can contain multiple encodings at the same time, such as web pages or multi-part mail messages.
Architecture and Design · Implementation · Attack Surface Reduction
Understand all the potential areas where untrusted inputs can enter your software: parameters or arguments, cookies, anything read from the network, environment variables, reverse DNS lookups, query results, request headers, URL components, e-mail, files, filenames, databases, and any external systems that provide…
OWASP Cheat Sheets
Cross Site Scripting Prevention (opens in a new tab)
DOM based XSS Prevention (opens in a new tab)
Injection Prevention (opens in a new tab)
Abuse Case (opens in a new tab)
Deserialization (opens in a new tab)
OWASP ASVS 4.0.3
V5.3.3 (opens in a new tab)
V1.5.1 (opens in a new tab)
Attack patterns
XSS Using MIME Type Mismatch (opens in a new tab)
DOM-Based XSS (opens in a new tab)
Reflected XSS (opens in a new tab)
Stored XSS (opens in a new tab)
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) (opens in a new tab)
From MITRE CWE, MITRE CAPEC and OWASP (Top 10, OpenCRE).

References

discuss.elastic.co/t/kibana-8-18-8-8-19-4-9-0-7-9-1-4-security-update-esa-2025-16/382450 (opens in a new tab)

Community reviews

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Exploitation evidence

What to do

Affected software

Description

AI analysisMachine-generated, updated 10 Oct 2025, 10:18 UTC

WeaknessesCWE-79

Technical details

References

Community reviews

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