Fortinet Patches Critical Unauthenticated RCE Vulnerability in FortiOS

Cybersecurity company Fortinet this week announced patches for multiple severe vulnerabilities across its product portfolio, including a critical flaw in FortiOS and FortiProxy that could lead to remote code execution (RCE).

Tracked as CVE-2023-25610 (CVSS score of 9.3), the issue impacts the administrative interface of the affected products and can be exploited without authentication, either for code execution or to cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition, via crafted requests.

The bug impacts FortiOS versions 7.2.0 through 7.2.3, 7.0.0 – 7.0.9, 6.4.0 – 6.4.11, 6.2.0 – 6.2.12, and all 6.0 versions. FortiProxy versions 7.2.0 – 7.2.2, 7.0.0 – 7.0.8, 2.0.0 – 2.0.11, all 1.2 versions, and all 1.1 versions are also impacted.

However, Fortinet also notes that on roughly 50 FortiGate and FortiWiFi appliances, the vulnerability can only be exploited to cause a DoS condition.

Users are advised to update to FortiOS version 7.4.0 or above, 7.2.4 or above, 7.0.10 or above, 6.4.12 or above, and 6.2.13 or above, FortiProxy version 7.2.3 or above, 7.0.9 or above, and 2.0.12 or above, and FortiOS-6K7K version 7.0.10 or above, 6.4.12 or above, and 6.2.13 or above.

As a workaround, administrators can disable the HTTP/HTTPS administrative interface or set IP address restrictions for accessing the interface.

Fortinet says it is not aware of this vulnerability being exploited in malicious attacks, but it’s not uncommon for such flaws to be exploited by threat actors shortly after the release of a patch. 

This week, the cybersecurity firm also announced patches for high-severity bugs in FortiOS, FortiProxy, FortiNAC, FortiSOAR, and FortiWeb.

Successful exploitation of these flaws could allow an attacker to escalate privileges, perform a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack, execute arbitrary commands as root, perform unauthorized actions, and execute unauthorized code.

Patches were also released for several medium-severity and low-severity issues impacting products such as FortiAnalyzer, FortiManager, FortiPortal, FortiSwitch, FortiOS, FortiProxy, FortiRecorder, FortiWeb, FortiAuthenticator, FortiDeceptor, and FortiMail.

Additional information on the addressed vulnerabilities can be found on Fortinet’s PSIRT advisories page.

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