If you are using Cisco's networking solutions, beware. The company has acknowledged 25 security vulnerabilities in its products. The flaws are mainly in the devices that run Cisco's IOS and IOS XE software. The networking gear company has released updates to fix the vulnerabilities.
Such a large number of vulnerabilities have been found in Cisco's Linux based Internetworking Operating System (IOS) due to user reporting, the company said in its semi-annual release note on September 24. However, there are two flaws that have a severity score of 8.8.
Web UI Vulnerability
Among the highest severity scores, CVE-2020-3400 has authorization bypass vulnerability. It could allow a hacker to remotely access the IOS XE web interface. Cisco says that the vulnerability is due to insufficient web user interface authorization that can be exploited by hackers by sending an altered HTTP request. Through this, a hacker can access and utilize parts of the UI and perform administer actions even if the permission is read-only.
The company said that there were no workarounds to fix the issue and only disabling the HTTP Server could block such attacks. Cisco has released updates to fix the issue. "Disabling the HTTP Server feature eliminates the attack vector for this vulnerability and maybe suitable mitigation until affected devices can be upgraded," it said.
Privilege Escalation Vulnerabilities
Another set of vulnerabilities to receive an 8.8 severity score is IOS XE's privilege escalation in the web management framework. Named CVE-2020-3141 and CVE-2020-3425, the vulnerabilities can be exploited by a hacker. It allows the attacker remote access with read-only privileges which can be elevated to administrator level.
However, hackers won't even need to exploit both the flaws to breach into a device. A lack of input and validation-checking mechanism for HTTP requests to API will allow the attacker access. There is no workaround for this vulnerability either and can only be fixed by disabling the HTTP server.
"An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a modified HTTP request to the affected device. An exploit could allow the attacker as a read-only user to execute CLI commands or configuration changes as if they were an administrative user," Cisco said.
That's not it though. There are several advisories with a SIR score of 8.6. Among them, Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerabilities are prevalent. The DoS vulnerability is mostly affecting Cisco's Catalyst 9800 series. Apart from that its AireOS software, 4461 integrated service routers, cBR-8 Converged Broadband routers, software zone-based firewall, and wireless controller software for Catalyst 9000 series are vulnerable to the flaws, ZDNet reported.
