CVE-2025-68389 is a vulnerability classified under CWE-770 (Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling) found in Elastic Kibana versions 7.0.0 through 9.2.0. The flaw allows a low-privileged authenticated user to craft HTTP requests that cause excessive allocation of computing resources by the Kibana process. This excessive resource consumption can degrade performance or cause a denial of service (DoS), rendering Kibana unavailable to legitimate users. The vulnerability arises because Kibana does not impose adequate limits or throttling on resource allocation triggered by user requests, enabling resource exhaustion attacks. The attack vector is network-based (AV:N), requires low attack complexity (AC:L), and privileges (PR:L) but no user interaction (UI:N). The vulnerability impacts availability (A:H) but does not affect confidentiality or integrity. No public exploits have been reported yet, but the potential for disruption exists in environments where Kibana is used for critical monitoring and visualization tasks. The lack of patch links indicates that a fix may be pending or not yet publicly released. Organizations relying on Kibana should monitor for unusual request patterns and prepare to apply updates once available.

For European organizations, the primary impact of CVE-2025-68389 is the potential denial of service of Kibana instances, which can disrupt monitoring, logging, and analytics workflows critical for operational awareness and security incident response. This disruption can delay detection of other security incidents or operational issues, increasing risk exposure. Organizations with large-scale deployments or those using Kibana for real-time data visualization in sectors such as finance, energy, telecommunications, and government may experience significant operational impact. The requirement for low-privileged authentication means insider threats or compromised accounts could exploit this vulnerability. Additionally, service outages could affect compliance with regulatory requirements for availability and incident management. The absence of confidentiality or integrity impact limits the risk to data breaches but does not diminish the operational risks associated with service unavailability.

To mitigate CVE-2025-68389, European organizations should: 1) Implement strict resource usage limits and throttling mechanisms at the application or infrastructure level to prevent excessive resource consumption by individual users or requests. 2) Enforce strong authentication and access controls to minimize the risk of low-privileged account compromise or misuse. 3) Monitor Kibana logs and network traffic for abnormal or excessive request patterns indicative of exploitation attempts. 4) Deploy Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) or API gateways with rate limiting to restrict abusive request volumes. 5) Prepare to apply vendor patches or updates promptly once released, and subscribe to Elastic security advisories for timely information. 6) Consider isolating Kibana instances in segmented network zones to limit impact scope. 7) Conduct regular security audits and penetration tests focusing on resource exhaustion scenarios. These measures go beyond generic advice by focusing on proactive detection and containment of resource abuse specific to Kibana's architecture.