Cisco and Juniper Networks have released security updates to patch various high severity vulnerabilities affecting the operating systems that run on their products.
Cisco has issued an update for its IOS XR operating system to address a flaw that can be exploited by a remote, unauthenticated attacker to cause the company’s Network Convergence System 6000 series routers to enter a denial-of-service (DoS) condition.
The security hole, tracked as CVE-2016-1426, can be exploited by sending SSH, SCP and SFTP management connections to the vulnerable device, which causes it to leak system timer resources.
The vulnerability has been found during the resolution of a support case and Cisco says it’s not aware of any instances where it has been leveraged for malicious purposes.
Juniper Networks has released advisories describing a total of eight medium and high severity vulnerabilities affecting Junos OS, the FreeBSD-based operating system running on the company’s switching, routing and security devices.
Based on the CVSS scores assigned by the company, the most serious flaw is an information leakage issue (CVE-2016-1279) that can be exploited by a remote, unauthenticated attacker with access to the J-Web service to gain administrative privileges on the affected device.
Another high severity vulnerability affects SRX series devices and it can allow an attacker to log in as root without a password (CVE-2016-1278). Only products running Junos OS 12.1X46 are affected.
High-end SRX series chassis can be plagued by a DoS vulnerability if application layer gateways (ALGs) are enabled. An attacker can leverage the flaw (CVE-2016-1276) to conduct a sustained DoS attack.
Products with a 64-bit architecture running Junos OS are impacted by an issue related to processing certain UDP packets. An attacker can exploit the weakness to trigger a kernel crash (CVE-2016-1263).
The other Junos OS flaws patched by Juniper are a kernel crash issue triggered with special ICMP packets (CVE-2016-1277), an old FreeBSD information leak (CVE-2009-1436), a problem related to self-signed certificates (CVE-2016-1280) and an mbuf leak (CVE-2016-1275).
Juniper Networks noted that there is no evidence of malicious exploitation for any of the disclosed security bugs.
A few weeks ago, Cisco and Juniper informed customers of a DoS vulnerability that affected products from both companies. The issue was related to the processing of certain IPv6 packets.
Related: Backdoors Not Patched in Many Juniper Firewalls
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