Headline
Cisco Finds New Zero Day Bug, Pledges Patches in Days
A patch for the max severity zero-day bug tracked as CVE-2023-20198 is coming soon, but the bug has already led to the compromise of tens of thousands of Cisco devices. And now, there’s a new unpatched threat.
Cisco said a patch for two actively exploited zero-day flaws in its IOS XE devices is scheduled to drop on Oct. 22.
The first Cisco zero-day bug, tracked under CVE-2023-20198, was announced on Oct. 16 and has a severity rating of 10 out of 10. At the time it was discovered, it had already allowed threat actors to compromise more than 10,000 Cisco devices.
On Oct. 19, Cisco said it believed the cyberattacks against its IOS XE devices were all being carried out by the same threat actor.
Now, in an Oct. 20 update to its threat advisory, Cisco reported there’s another previously unknown flaw involved, tracked under CVE-2023-20273 — it carries a slightly less scary CVSS score of 7.2.
Both are being used in the same exploit chain. Threat actors used the first bug for initial access, and the second to escalate privileges once authenticated, according to an emailed statement from Cisco announcing the coming patch release.
Cisco also added another clarification from its earlier reporting on the first bug: it was thought in the early response that the threat actor had combined the new zero-day with a known and patched vulnerability from 2021, raising the specter of a patch bypass issue. But Cisco has now dismissed that theory, according to a statement from the company.
“The CVE-2021-1435 that had previously been mentioned is no longer assessed to be associated with this activity,” it said.
Exploitation Could Continue for Years
As Cisco continues to wrap its arms around the breadth of the threat, cybersecurity expert and consultant Immanuel Chavoya expects to see a spike in malicious activity against vulnerable devices in the lead up to the release of the updated version.
“Active exploitation will continue and lead to ransomware probably over this weekend, as threat actors rush to capitalize before any patch or remediation,” he predicts.
But beyond the short-term, Chavoya is dubious many Cisco customers will take the necessary steps to remediate.
“I can tell you from experience many customers do not or will never patch — and are absolutely unaware of the exploitation status currently (SMBs, etc.) — and so thus, exploitation will continue for months or years.”
Related news
This Metasploit module leverages both CVE-2023-20198 and CVE-2023-20273 against vulnerable instances of Cisco IOS XE devices which have the web UI exposed. An attacker can execute a payload with root privileges. The vulnerable IOS XE versions are 16.1.1, 16.1.2, 16.1.3, 16.2.1, 16.2.2, 16.3.1, 16.3.2, 16.3.3, 16.3.1a, 16.3.4, 16.3.5, 16.3.5b, 16.3.6, 16.3.7, 16.3.8, 16.3.9, 16.3.10, 16.3.11, 16.4.1, 16.4.2, 16.4.3, 16.5.1, 16.5.1a, 16.5.1b, 16.5.2, 16.5.3, 16.6.1, 16.6.2, 16.6.3, 16.6.4, 16.6.5, 16.6.4s, 16.6.4a, 16.6.5a, 16.6.6, 16.6.5b, 16.6.7, 16.6.7a, 16.6.8, 16.6.9, 16.6.10, 16.7.1, 16.7.1a, 16.7.1b, 16.7.2, 16.7.3, 16.7.4, 16.8.1, 16.8.1a, 16.8.1b, 16.8.1s, 16.8.1c, 16.8.1d, 16.8.2, 16.8.1e, 16.8.3, 16.9.1, 16.9.2, 16.9.1a, 16.9.1b, 16.9.1s, 16.9.1c, 16.9.1d, 16.9.3, 16.9.2a, 16.9.2s, 16.9.3h, 16.9.4, 16.9.3s, 16.9.3a, 16.9.4c, 16.9.5, 16.9.5f, 16.9.6, 16.9.7, 16.9.8, 16.9.8a, 16.9.8b, 16.9.8c, 16.10.1, 16.10.1a, 16.10.1b, 16.10.1s, 16.10.1c, 16.10.1e, 16.10.1d, 16.10.2, 16.10.1f...
Hello everyone! October was an interesting and busy month for me. I started a new job, worked on my open source Vulristics project, and analyzed vulnerabilities using it. Especially Linux vulnerabilities as part of my new Linux Patch Wednesday project. And, of course, analyzed Microsoft Patch Tuesday as well. In addition, at the end of […]
Plus: Major vulnerability fixes are now available for a number of enterprise giants, including Cisco, VMWare, Citrix, and SAP.
The backdoor implanted on Cisco devices by exploiting a pair of zero-day flaws in IOS XE software has been modified by the threat actor so as to escape visibility via previous fingerprinting methods. "Investigated network traffic to a compromised device has shown that the threat actor has upgraded the implant to do an extra header check," NCC Group's Fox-IT team said. "Thus, for a lot of devices
A seemingly sharp drop in the number of compromised Cisco IOS XE devices visible on the Internet led to a flurry of speculation over the weekend — but it turns out the malicious implants were just hiding.
Cisco has warned of a new zero-day flaw in IOS XE that has been actively exploited by an unknown threat actor to deploy a malicious Lua-based implant on susceptible devices. Tracked as CVE-2023-20273 (CVSS score: 7.2), the issue relates to a privilege escalation flaw in the web UI feature and is said to have been used alongside CVE-2023-20198 as part of an exploit chain. "The attacker first
Cisco has warned of a new zero-day flaw in IOS XE that has been actively exploited by an unknown threat actor to deploy a malicious Lua-based implant on susceptible devices. Tracked as CVE-2023-20273 (CVSS score: 7.2), the issue relates to a privilege escalation flaw in the web UI feature and is said to have been used alongside CVE-2023-20198 as part of an exploit chain. "The attacker first
By Deeba Ahmed It is unclear how long Cisco will take to release a patch. This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Cisco Web UI Vulnerability Exploited Massly, Impacting Over 40K Devices
By Deeba Ahmed It is unclear how long Cisco will take to release a patch. This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Cisco Web UI Vulnerability Exploited Massly, Impacting Over 40K Devices
Taking a “Security Action” of any kind — whether it be simply enabling multi-factor authentication for your online banking login or marking that weird email as spam — can go a long way toward you and any organizations you’re a part of be more security resilient.
Categories: Exploits and vulnerabilities Categories: News Tags: Cisco Tags: IOS X Tags: remote management Tags: vulnerability Tags: CVE-2023-20198 Tags: webUI Tags: http server Tags: http secure-server Researchers have found that a recently disclosed vulnerability in Cisco IOS XE has already rendered thousands of compromised devices. (Read more...) The post Cisco IOS XE vulnerability widely exploited in the wild appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.
Just a day after Cisco disclosed CVE-2023-20198, it remains unpatched, and one vendor says a Shodan scan shows at least 10,000 Cisco devices with an implant for arbitrary code execution on them. The vendor meanwhile has updated the advisory with more mitigation steps.
Cisco has warned of a critical, unpatched security flaw impacting IOS XE software that’s under active exploitation in the wild. Rooted in the web UI feature, the zero-day vulnerability is assigned as CVE-2023-20198 and has been assigned the maximum severity rating of 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system. It’s worth pointing out that the shortcoming only affects enterprise networking gear that have
Cisco has warned of a critical, unpatched security flaw impacting IOS XE software that’s under active exploitation in the wild. Rooted in the web UI feature, the zero-day vulnerability is assigned as CVE-2023-20198 and has been assigned the maximum severity rating of 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system. It’s worth pointing out that the shortcoming only affects enterprise networking gear that have
By Waqas Another day, another critical vulnerability hits Cisco! This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: New Cisco Web UI Vulnerability Exploited by Attackers
No patch or workaround is currently available for the maximum severity flaw, which allows attackers to gain complete administrator privilege on affected devices remotely and without authentication.
Cisco is aware of active exploitation of a previously unknown vulnerability in the web UI feature of Cisco IOS XE Software when exposed to the internet or to untrusted networks. This vulnerability allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to create an account on an affected system with privilege level 15 access. The attacker can then use that account to gain control of the affected system. For steps to close the attack vector for this vulnerability, see the Recommendations section of this advisory Cisco will provide updates on the status of this investigation and when a software patch is available.
Cisco has identified active exploitation of a previously unknown vulnerability in the Web User Interface (Web UI) feature of Cisco IOS XE software (CVE-2023-20198) when exposed to the internet or untrusted networks.
Cisco has identified active exploitation of a previously unknown vulnerability in the Web User Interface (Web UI) feature of Cisco IOS XE software (CVE-2023-20198) when exposed to the internet or untrusted networks.