Cisco published an advisory on Wednesday to warn customers that some of the company’s Aironet access points are affected by a critical flaw that could allow an attacker to take complete control of a vulnerable device.
The security hole, tracked as CVE-2017-3834, involves the existence of default credentials that can be used by a remote attacker who has layer 3 connectivity to log in to a device with elevated privileges via SSH.
The vulnerability impacts Cisco Aironet 1830 and 1850 series APs running an 8.2.x version of the Mobility Express software prior to 8.2.111.0. The company pointed out that the weakness can be exploited regardless of whether the device is configured as a master, subordinate or standalone AP.
Cisco has also informed customers of a medium severity shell bypass vulnerability affecting Aironet 1800, 2800 and 3800 series APs. A local attacker with root privileges can exploit the flaw to gain root access to the underlying Linux operating system. This root shell is designed only for advanced troubleshooting and it should not be available to any user, even if they have root privileges.
The networking giant has also published advisories detailing three high severity denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerabilities affecting its Wireless LAN Controller (WLC) software.
These security holes affect the Wireless Multimedia Extensions (WME), IPv6 UDP ingress packet processing, and the web management interface components of the WLC software. Remote or adjacent attackers can exploit the flaws without authentication.
Cisco has released software updates for each of the affected WLC versions. Workarounds are not available.
Most of these vulnerabilities were discovered by Cisco itself and the company said there was no evidence of exploitation in the wild.
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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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