CVE-2026-78413 Velociraptor privilege escalation via SysmonLogForward client monitoring artifact
Attackers with Investigator role can execute arbitrary binaries on endpoints by exploiting missing permission checks in the SysmonLogForward artifact.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- An administrator
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- None listed
What is CVE-2026-78413?
CVE-2026-78413 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Rapid7 Velociraptor, published on 5 Oct 2026. An attacker needs administrator access to exploit it, with no action from the victim.
Official description
Velociraptor allows collection of VQL queries packaged into Artifacts from endpoints. These artifacts can be used to do anything and usually run with elevated permissions. To limit access to some dangerous artifact, Velociraptor allows for those to require high permissions like EXECVE to launch.
The `Windows.Sysinternals.SysmonLogForward` is a monitoring artifact used to forward sysmon events to the server. The artifact allows the user to specify an arbitrary binary path as a parameter, and did not enforce an additional required permission, allowing users with COLLECT_CLIENT permissions (normally given by the "Investigator" role) to collect it from endpoints and run a different binary program than the installed sysmon binary. To successfully exploit this vulnerability the user must already have access to collect artifacts from the endpoint (i.e. have the COLLECT_CLIENT given typically by the "Investigator" role).
Weakness: CWE-276
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-78413?
How do I fix CVE-2026-78413?
No fix has been published for CVE-2026-78413 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.
Is CVE-2026-78413 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-78413 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as GHSA-9q45-6cc2-4qjv.