ExternalSecrets vulnerable to privilege escalation with secret overwriting — CVE-2026-42876

Summary

ExternalSecrets allows users to craft Service Account tokens for misconfigured Service Accounts in namespaces the users have access to. ### Impact A user who only has permission to create ExternalSecret resources can cause the operator to create a Secret that Kubernetes will automatically populate with a long-lived token for the sepcified service account. This effectively allows the user to impersonate any service…

Product

go: github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/apis

What to do

General, cautious steps (verify details in the official source):

• Review exposure and plan remediation based on risk and environment.
• Identify affected product versions in your inventory and verify whether you are impacted.
• Apply vendor patches/updates or recommended mitigations as soon as available.
• Read the official advisory for exact affected versions and remediation steps.

Official advisory

• Read the official source
• CVE Record
• NVD

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