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Cisco Confirms In-the-Wild Exploitation of Two VPN Vulnerabilities

Cisco has confirmed that two vulnerabilities affecting one of its VPN products are being exploited in the wild.

Cisco has confirmed that two vulnerabilities affecting one of its VPN products are being exploited in the wild.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) this week added two flaws affecting Cisco’s AnyConnect product to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.

The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2020-3433 and CVE-2020-3153, affect the AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client for Windows, and they were patched by Cisco in August 2020. They can be exploited by a local, authenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code and copy files to arbitrary locations, with elevated privileges.

Details and proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits have been available for both flaws and Cisco has now updated its advisories for CVE-2020-3433 and CVE-2020-3153 to confirm that it’s aware of active exploitation attempts.

“In October 2022, the Cisco PSIRT became aware of additional attempted exploitation of this vulnerability in the wild. Cisco continues to strongly recommend that customers upgrade to a fixed software release to remediate this vulnerability,” the company said.

No details appear to be available regarding the attacks involving these vulnerabilities, but considering that their exploitation requires authentication, they are likely leveraged as part of a complex, multi-stage attack by a sophisticated threat actor.

This is not the first time CISA has revealed that some Cisco product vulnerabilities are being exploited. In March, the agency warned about attacks leveraging critical Cisco router flaws that had recently been patched. However, even today there do not appear to be any public reports describing in-the-wild exploitation and Cisco’s advisory still hasn’t been updated to confirm exploitation.

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CISA added the Cisco VPN flaws to its catalog this week alongside four 2018 security bugs affecting Gigabyte drivers.

There are no public reports about the Gigabyte driver vulnerabilities being exploited. Only one of them was mentioned in 2020, when a ransomware group leveraged a Gigabyte driver to remove security products from targeted devices before encrypting files.

Related: XSS Vulnerability in Cisco Security Products Exploited in the Wild

Related: Cisco Warns of Exploitation Attempts Targeting New IOS XR Vulnerability

Related: Cisco Patches High-Severity Vulnerabilities in Networking Software

Written By

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

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