Summary A bug in the webhook generator initialization order incorrectly cleared the label-enforcement flag (EnforceLabels) after it was set, resulting in the provider-side check for external-secrets.io/type=webhook being skipped (and the operation to succeed while it should have failed with secret does not contain needed label 'external-secrets.io/type: webhook'. Update secret label to use it with webhook.

Impact A user with the permission to create webhook generator can set the webhook generator to a victim' secret (which was not previously labelled for webhook's use), and exfiltrate it to a malicious URL.

Mitigations Until you upgrade, you can reduce risk by: - disabling webhook generators if not needed (or denying generators.external-secrets.io/v1alpha1 Webhook via an admission policy); - restricting RBAC: limit who can create generators of kind Webhook; - enforcing an admission policy (OPA Gatekeeper / Kyverno) requiring referenced secrets to be labeled external-secrets.io/type=webhook; - restricting egress from external-secrets controller pods to an allowlist (kubernetes NetworkPolicy / service mesh egress policy).

References - PR #5901 (fix: webhook initialization order)

Insecure permissions in external-secrets v0.9.16 allows attackers to access sensitive data and escalate privileges by obtaining the service account's token.