Description

A low privileged remote attacker can hijack an active administrative session without needing to know the administrator password by extracting live plaintext session identifiers for authenticated users from downloadable error log archives.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "8.8",
  "pubDate": "2026-08-20T09:16:47.137Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-08-20T09:16:47.137Z",
  "executiveSummary": "This vulnerability involves an insecure handling of sensitive authentication data within downloadable error log archives, allowing a low privileged remote attacker to compromise active administrative sessions without requiring knowledge of the administrator password.\nThe primary vulnerability type is sensitive data exposure leading to session hijacking. The impact is severe, resulting in total administrative account takeover and unauthorized administrative control over the affected system.\nThe affected systems include applications that generate downloadable error log archives containing live plaintext session identifiers for authenticated users.\nThe risk implications are critical, as an unauthenticated or low-privileged remote threat actor can bypass authentication controls entirely by harvesting active session tokens from unsecured diagnostic artifacts.\nAttacker capabilities are limited to remote execution with low privileges, yet the exploitation requirements are minimal since the attacker only needs the ability to trigger or download the error log archives containing the exposed plaintext session identifiers.",
  "technicalDetails": "The root cause of this vulnerability is the insecure logging and serialization of active user session identifiers in plaintext format within diagnostic error log archives that are accessible for download.\nThe vulnerable component is the application's logging subsystem and diagnostic archive generation mechanism, which fails to scrub or redact sensitive authentication materials such as live session tokens prior to packaging logs for administrative retrieval.\nThe network exposure is remote, allowing attackers interacting with the web application over the network to leverage the flaw. The privilege requirements are low, meaning an adversary requires only a standard, unprivileged user account or in some contexts unauthenticated remote access to download the targeted diagnostic archives.\nThe step-by-step attack flow proceeds as follows: First, the low-privileged attacker identifies the endpoint or functionality responsible for generating and downloading error log archives. Second, the attacker initiates a download of the error log archive. Third, the attacker parses the downloaded plaintext log files to search for active administrative session identifiers. Fourth, upon extracting a valid plaintext session identifier belonging to an authenticated administrator, the attacker injects this token into their own client HTTP requests. Finally, the application validates the hijacked session token, granting the attacker full administrative access and successfully hijacking the active administrative session without needing to know the administrator password.\nThe post-exploitation impact allows the attacker to perform administrative actions, modify system configurations, access restricted data, and potentially pivot deeper into the underlying infrastructure depending on the privileges and capabilities granted to the hijacked administrative session."
}