Cisco on Thursday informed customers that it has released software updates for its Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) product to address several critical and high-severity vulnerabilities.
All of the serious vulnerabilities patched in DCNM were reported to Cisco by researcher Steven Seeley of Source Incite. The flaws were reported by Seeley through Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) and Accenture’s iDefense service.
Cisco has published a total of six advisories for a dozen vulnerabilities affecting the network management solution. Eleven of these security holes were reported by Seeley, with three of them rated critical and seven high severity. The remaining issue was reported by Harrison Neal of PatchAdvisor and has been rated medium severity.
ZDI will publish its own advisories for the flaws and its website lists over 120 upcoming advisories describing vulnerabilities found by Seeley in Cisco products. It’s worth noting that ZDI publishes a separate advisory for each variation of a vulnerability, which results in multiple advisories for a single CVE.
The most serious vulnerabilities patched by Cisco in its Data Center Network Manager product — all of them have been rated critical — can allow a remote attacker to bypass authentication and execute arbitrary actions with admin privileges on the targeted device.
The security holes are tracked as CVE-2019-15975, CVE-2019-15976 and CVE-2019-15977, and they impact the REST API endpoint, the SOAP API endpoint and the web-based management interface, respectively. The flaws are caused by the existence of static encryption keys and credentials.
Two of the high-severity flaws, described as SQL injection bugs, require administrative privileges and they allow an attacker to execute arbitrary SQL commands on a device.
Three of the high-severity weaknesses allow an attacker who has admin privileges to conduct path traversals, and two other high-severity flaws allow an attacker with admin rights to inject arbitrary commands on the underlying operating system.
While it may appear that these vulnerabilities are not serious enough for them to be rated high severity given that exploitation requires administrator privileges, Cisco has pointed out that the severity rating is high due to the fact that a malicious actor could exploit them in combination with the critical authentication bypass flaws, which can grant hackers admin privileges.
Cisco says it has found no evidence that any of these vulnerabilities has been exploited for malicious purposes.
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