CVE-2023-41265 — Qlik Sense
CRITICALCVE-2023-41265 is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.6) CWE-444 vulnerability in qlik qlik sense. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2023-12-07) and has been used in ransomware campaigns — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.
An HTTP Request Tunneling vulnerability found in Qlik Sense Enterprise for Windows for versions May 2023 Patch 3 and earlier, February 2023 Patch 7 and earlier, November 2022 Patch…
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2023-12-07 — including use in ransomware campaigns. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2023-12-28.
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA (KEV catalog and SSVC triage) for CVE-2023-41265.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2023-41265 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). In the shaded patch-first corner (EPSS 50%+, CVSS 7.0+).
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 394,803 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the 50–90% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
An HTTP Request Tunneling vulnerability found in Qlik Sense Enterprise for Windows for versions May 2023 Patch 3 and earlier, February 2023 Patch 7 and earlier, November 2022 Patch 10 and earlier, and August 2022 Patch 12 and earlier allows a remote attacker to elevate their privilege by tunneling HTTP requests in the raw HTTP request. This allows them to send requests that get executed by the backend server hosting the repository application. This is fixed in August 2023 IR, May 2023 Patch 4, February 2023 Patch 8, November 2022 Patch 11, and August 2022 Patch 13.
Affected Products
qlik senseqlikResearch use only. For defensive security, authorized penetration testing, and academic research only. Never execute exploit code against systems without explicit written authorization.
Detection & mitigation playbook
Vendor / applianceDetect
Inventory every qlik qlik sense deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.
Remediation status
No patch has shipped for CVE-2023-41265 yet — track the qlik qlik sense advisory for a fixed release and apply the workarounds below in the meantime.
Mitigate without a patch
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands. Alongside that, restrict the management interface to trusted networks and apply the vendor's recommended configuration mitigations.
How to detect CVE-2023-41265
A community-maintained Nuclei template exists for this CVE. You can scan for it directly:
nuclei -id cve-2023-41265 -u https://target- Template
- Qlik Sense Enterprise - HTTP Request Smuggling
- Severity
- critical
- Impact
- Authenticated attackers with low privileges can exploit HTTP request tunneling to escalate privileges and execute malicious requests on the Qlik Sense repository application backend server.
- Remediation
- Update Qlik Sense Enterprise for Windows to August 2023 IR, May 2023 Patch 4, February 2023 Patch 8, November 2022 Patch 11, or August 2022 Patch 13 that fixes HTTP request smuggling in the repository application.
Template by ProjectDiscovery nuclei-templates (AdamCrosser), MIT licensed. View the full template. Scan only systems you are authorised to test.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2023-41265 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.