Security Experts:

Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Vulnerabilities

Fortinet Patches Critical Code Execution Vulnerabilities in FortiNAC, FortiWeb

Fortinet releases 40 security advisories to inform customers about patches, including for critical code execution vulnerabilities in FortiNAC and FortiWeb.

Fortinet released 40 security advisories last week to inform customers about the availability of patches for dozens of vulnerabilities, including critical flaws affecting the FortiNAC and FortiWeb products. 

Two of the advisories have a ‘critical’ severity rating and 15 of them have been classified as having ‘high’ severity. 

One of the critical advisories describes CVE-2021-42756, a CVE identifier assigned to multiple stack-based buffer overflow vulnerabilities in FortiWeb’s proxy daemon. The security holes can allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code on the targeted system using malicious HTTP requests. 

Based on its identifier, CVE-2021-42756 was discovered more than one year ago. It’s unclear why Fortinet has waited until now to patch it, but given its severity rating, some have speculated that potential exploitation in the wild could be a reason. 

Critical Fortinet vulnerability

The second critical advisory describes CVE-2022-39952, an external file name or path control issue in FortiNAC that can allow an unauthenticated attacker to write data on a system, which could result in arbitrary code execution.

Autonomous pentesting company Horizon3 announced that it will soon release a blog post detailing how CVE-2022-39952 can be exploited for remote code execution with root privileges. Horizon3 also plans on releasing a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit

Threat intelligence company GreyNoise has used information provided by Horizon3 to start monitoring the internet for attacks exploiting the vulnerability. At the time of writing, there do not appear to be any attack attempts targeting CVE-2022-39952.

There are hundreds of thousands of Fortinet systems that are exposed to the internet and many of them could be vulnerable to attacks exploiting CVE-2022-39952.

Fortinet’s advisories for CVE-2021-42756 and CVE-2022-39952 currently do not mention anything about exploitation in the wild. 

The high-severity vulnerabilities for which patches were announced last week impact products such as FortiADC, FortiExtender, FortiNAC, FortiOS, FortiProxy, FortiSwitchManager, FortiWAN, and FortiWeb.  

They can be exploited to execute arbitrary code with elevated privileges, execute arbitrary OS commands, perform administrative operations, obtain user passwords, launch XSS attacks, read and write files on the underlying Linux system, and hijack sessions, but many require authentication. 

The critical and many of the high-severity vulnerabilities were discovered internally by Fortinet. 

It’s not uncommon for threat actors to target Fortinet product vulnerabilities in their attacks so it’s important that users install the patches as soon as possible.

One of the most recent actively exploited vulnerabilities is CVE-2022-42475, which has been leveraged by a China-linked threat actor in attacks aimed at government organizations in Europe. 

Related: Fortinet Ships Emergency Patch for Already-Exploited VPN Flaw

Related: High-Severity Command Injection Flaws Found in Fortinet’s FortiTester, FortiADC

Related: Fortinet Confirms Zero-Day Vulnerability Exploited in One Attack

Written By

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.

Click to comment

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join this webinar to learn best practices that organizations can use to improve both their resilience to new threats and their response times to incidents.

Register

Join this live webinar as we explore the potential security threats that can arise when third parties are granted access to a sensitive data or systems.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Vulnerabilities

Less than a week after announcing that it would suspended service indefinitely due to a conflict with an (at the time) unnamed security researcher...

Risk Management

The supply chain threat is directly linked to attack surface management, but the supply chain must be known and understood before it can be...

Vulnerabilities

Apple has released updates for macOS, iOS and Safari and they all include a WebKit patch for a zero-day vulnerability tracked as CVE-2023-23529.

Vulnerabilities

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft warns vulnerability (CVE-2023-23397) could lead to exploitation before an email is viewed in the Preview Pane.

Application Security

Drupal released updates that resolve four vulnerabilities in Drupal core and three plugins.

Cloud Security

VMware vRealize Log Insight vulnerability allows an unauthenticated attacker to take full control of a target system.

IoT Security

Lexmark warns of a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability impacting over 120 printer models, for which PoC code has been published.

Application Security

A CSRF vulnerability in the source control management (SCM) service Kudu could be exploited to achieve remote code execution in multiple Azure services.