Cisco has announced patches for a high-severity escalation of privilege vulnerability in AsyncOS for Cisco Secure Web Appliance.
Formerly Web Security Appliance (WSA), Cisco’s Secure Web Appliance is an enterprise protection solution designed to block risky sites and provide application visibility and control.
Tracked as CVE-2022-20871, the newly addressed flaw can be exploited remotely to inject commands and escalate privileges to root, but requires authentication for successful exploitation.
According to Cisco, the security bug exists because user-supplied input for the web interface is not sufficiently validated.
“An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by authenticating to the system and sending a crafted HTTP packet to the affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the underlying operating system and elevate privileges to root,” Cisco explains.
The tech giant also notes that the attacker needs to have at least read-only credentials to successfully exploit the issue.
Cisco has resolved the vulnerability with the release of AsyncOS for Secure Web Appliance version 14.5.0-537 and plans to release updates for versions 12.5 and 14.0 of the appliance as well.
There are no workarounds available to address the vulnerability and Cisco encourages customers to install the available patches as soon as possible.
Cisco says it is not aware of this vulnerability being exploited in malicious attacks.
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