IBM Cognos Analytics Agentic AI Assistant Race Condition
First seen Jul 18, 2026 · Updated Jul 18, 2026 · CVSS 5.4
A concurrency flaw in IBM Cognos Analytics' Agentic AI assistant causes incorrect report summaries or processing failures when multiple authenticated users submit report tasks at the same time. This is a reliability/integrity bug rather than an exploitable attacker-controlled takeover primitive, though it could be leveraged to degrade service or corrupt report outputs relied on for decision-making.
Technical Analysis
The vulnerability stems from a race condition in the concurrent request-handling logic of the Agentic AI assistant component, likely due to shared state (session context, task queues, or caching layers) not being properly isolated or locked between simultaneous user requests. An authenticated attacker could submit concurrent report-related tasks to trigger interleaved processing, causing another user's request to receive incorrect summary data or fail outright. The entry point is the standard authenticated report-submission interface rather than a novel prompt-injection or tool-boundary crossing; the impact is data integrity (wrong results shown to a different user) and availability (processing failures), not direct code execution or privilege escalation. Because the flaw is in shared concurrency handling, it could cross user-session boundaries within the same multi-tenant agent instance, leaking or corrupting output between unrelated users' sessions.
Affected Systems
IBM Cognos Analytics
Detection Signatures
- Unexpected report summary mismatches correlated with high concurrent user load
- Error logs showing report-processing failures timestamped near simultaneous multi-user submissions
- Anomalous spikes in Agentic AI assistant task queue contention or lock timeout warnings
- User reports of receiving another user's report data or stale/incorrect summaries
Remediation Steps
- 1
Apply IBM vendor patch
Upgrade to the fixed build of IBM Cognos Analytics 12.1.3 once IBM releases a patch addressing this CVE.
- 2
Limit concurrent agentic sessions
Where possible, throttle or queue simultaneous report-generation requests to reduce race condition exposure until patched.
- 3
Monitor for output integrity issues
Add validation/logging to detect cross-session data mixups or failed report generations during peak concurrent usage.
- 4
Restrict access
Limit Agentic AI assistant access to trusted authenticated users and monitor for abnormal simultaneous task submission patterns.
CVE / Advisory IDs
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