Vulnerabilities

Cisco Patches Critical Vulnerability in Small Business VPN Routers

Cisco on Wednesday announced the release of patches for a critical vulnerability in small business VPN routers that could allow unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code on affected devices.

Ionut Arghire

August 5, 2021

Tracked as CVE-2021-1609 (CVSS score 9.8), the issue was discovered in the web interface of RV340, RV340W, RV345, and RV345P routers and exists because HTTP requests are not properly validated.

To exploit the bug, a remote, unauthenticated attacker has to send specially crafted HTTP requests to an affected device, which could allow them to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (DoS) condition.

“[T]he web management interface is locally accessible by default and cannot be disabled, but is not enabled for remote management by default. However, based on queries via BinaryEdge, we’ve confirmed there are at least 8,850 remotely accessible devices,” Satnam Narang, staff research engineer at Tenable, commented.

CVE-2021-1610, a second vulnerability addressed in the same devices, could result in an attacker executing arbitrary commands as root. While exploitation is similar to the critical vulnerability, authentication is required for a successful attack, which lowers the bug’s severity rating to high.

The two vulnerabilities can be exploited independently of one another, Cisco says. The company has released patches for both issues and says that it’s not aware of any malicious attacks exploiting them.

“Organizations that use these Cisco Small Business VPN routers and have exposed their management interface externally can address these flaws by patching their devices. If patching is not feasible at this time, disabling the remote management option on these devices will mitigate the flaws until patches can be applied,” Narang said.

On Wednesday, Cisco released patches for a series of other high-severity vulnerabilities as well, including a remote command execution issue in RV160, RV160W, RV260, RV260P, and RV260W VPN routers, a DLL injection bug in Packet Tracer for Windows, a command injection flaw in Network Services Orchestrator, and a privilege escalation issue in ConfD.

Written By Ionut Arghire

Ionut Arghire is an international correspondent for SecurityWeek.

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