Vulnerabilities

Cisco Patches 17 High-Severity Vulnerabilities in Security Appliances

Cisco on Wednesday announced the release of patches for 17 high-severity vulnerabilities in its security appliances as part of its Security Advisory Bundled Publication for October 2020.

Eduard Kovacs

October 22, 2020

Cisco on Wednesday announced the release of patches for 17 high-severity vulnerabilities in its security appliances as part of its Security Advisory Bundled Publication for October 2020.

The vulnerabilities have been found to impact Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA), Firepower Threat Defense (FTD), and Firepower Management Center (FMC).

A majority of the flaws can be exploited remotely without authentication, including to alter data between FMC and FTD devices via an MitM attack, conduct actions on behalf of a user via a CSRF attack, and bypass FMC authentication.

However, most of the vulnerabilities that can be exploited remotely without authentication allow an attacker to cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. In some cases, recovering from this DoS condition requires a manual reboot of the device.

The flaws whose exploitation requires local access or authentication can be exploited to read or write files on a device, cause a DoS condition, bypass the secure boot mechanism, and escape containers and execute commands with root privileges.

A majority of these security holes were found internally and Cisco says it has found no evidence that any of them has been exploited in attacks.

The company did, however, warn customers this week that a Discovery Protocol vulnerability disclosed earlier this year has been exploited in attacks. The U.S. National Security Agency included the flaw, tracked as CVE-2020-3118, in a list of vulnerabilities exploited by Chinese state-sponsored hackers.

Last month, the networking giant released a patch bundle that fixed 34 high-severity vulnerabilities in its IOS and IOS XE software.

Written By Eduard Kovacs

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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