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.
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
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.
More from Eduard Kovacs
- Zyxel Firewalls Hacked by Mirai Botnet
- New Russia-Linked CosmicEnergy ICS Malware Could Disrupt Electric Grids
- Drop in Insider Breaches Drives Decline in Intrusions at OT Organizations
- Zero-Day Vulnerability Exploited to Hack Barracuda Email Security Gateway Appliances
- OAuth Vulnerabilities in Widely Used Expo Framework Allowed Account Takeovers
- New Honeywell OT Cybersecurity Solution Helps Identify Vulnerabilities, Threats
- Rheinmetall Says Military Business Not Impacted by Ransomware Attack
- Dish Ransomware Attack Impacted Nearly 300,000 People
Latest News
- Organizations Worldwide Targeted in Rapidly Evolving Buhti Ransomware Operation
- Google Cloud Users Can Now Automate TLS Certificate Lifecycle
- Zyxel Firewalls Hacked by Mirai Botnet
- Watch Now: Threat Detection and Incident Response Virtual Summit
- NCC Group Releases Open Source Tools for Developers, Pentesters
- Memcyco Raises $10 Million in Seed Funding to Prevent Website Impersonation
- New Russia-Linked CosmicEnergy ICS Malware Could Disrupt Electric Grids
- Security Pros: Before You Do Anything, Understand Your Threat Landscape

