Cisco has released updates to address a serious vulnerability in the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Central software that can be exploited by remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands on affected systems.
The Cisco UCS Central software enables organizations to manage multiple Cisco UCS domains across globally distributed data centers. The solution is designed to simplify global operations with a centralized view of inventory, faults, and logs.
According to Cisco, the solution’s web framework is plagued by a security bug caused by improper input validation (CVE-2015-0701). The vulnerability allows an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the underlying operating system with root privileges.
“Successful exploitation of the vulnerability may permit unauthenticated access to sensitive information, allow arbitrary command execution on the Cisco UCS Central operating system or impact the availability of the affected device,” Cisco said in its advisory.
The flaw affects Cisco UCS Central software version 1.2 and prior, and it can be exploited by sending specially crafted HTTP requests to a vulnerable device. Cisco has assigned the bug a CVSS score of 10.
Software updates that fix the vulnerability have been made available by Cisco. Customers are advised to update their installations, but Cisco recommends checking the software for feature set compatibility and other issues that might be specific to their environment. Workarounds for mitigating the flaw are not available.
The company says it hasn’t found any evidence to suggest that the security bug has been exploited in the wild.
Over the past months, Cisco released security updates for several of its products. The list includes Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA), Cisco Small Business SPA300 and SPA500 series IP phones, and IOS software.