Cisco releases security fixes for critical VPN, router vulnerabilities

July 17, 2020 TH Author

Cisco has issued a security update that tackles 34 vulnerabilities, five of which are deemed critical.

It’s been an interesting month for enterprise administrators and security staff with Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday including fixes for 123 vulnerabilities across 13 products. In particular, warnings were issued over SigRed (CVE-2020-1350), a 17-year-old critical bug that can be used to hijack Microsoft Windows Server builds.

Adobe, SAP, VMware, and Oracle have also released their own security updates.

Over this week, Cisco added its own contribution, with the networking giant releasing patches for 34 bugs, the most severe of which can be exploited to conduct remote code execution and privilege escalation attacks.

The first of the critical bugs, now resolved, is CVE-2020-3330. Issued a CVSS severity score of 9.8, this security flaw impacts the Telnet service in Cisco Small Business RV110W Wireless-N VPN Firewall routers and is caused by the use of a default, static password. If obtained by attackers, this can lead to the full remote hijacking of a device.

The second security flaw of note is CVE-2020-3323 (CVSS 9.8) which impacts Cisco Small Business RV110W, RV130, RV130W, and RV215W routers. The online management portal has improper validation problems that can be exploited through crafted, malicious HTTP requests.

“A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code as the root user on the underlying operating system of the affected device,” Cisco says.

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The third vulnerability is CVE-2020-3144, another CVSS 9.8 bug that impacts the same router line. This security flaw is also present in the web management portal and “could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication and execute arbitrary commands with administrative commands on an affected device,” according to the tech giant.

CVE-2020-3331, also deemed critical, is present in the Cisco RV110W Wireless-N VPN Firewall and Cisco RV215W Wireless-N VPN routers. Issued a severity score of 9.8, this bug — found in the hardware’s web management interface — was due to how user input is handled and can be abused by unauthenticated, remote attackers to execute arbitrary code with root privileges.

The final critical issue is CVE-2020-3140 (CVSS 9.8), present in Cisco Prime License Manager (PLM). Another web management portal issue caused by improper user input handling could be abused by attackers sending malicious requests, potentially leading to administrator-level privilege escalation. However, attackers do need a valid username to start with in order to exploit this vulnerability.

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In addition to the critical vulnerabilities, Cisco also issued a wide variety of fixes for products and services including Identity Services, email services, SD-Wan vManage and vEdge, and Webex meetings, among other software.

Ranging from high to medium severity, these security issues include SQL injections, cross-site scripting (XSS) bugs, filter bypass, information leaks, and denial-of-service.

It is recommended that Cisco customers accept automatic updates or manually apply the latest round of security fixes as soon as possible.

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