Cisco Issues 31 Mid-April Security Alerts

A busy month for Cisco router owners got busier yesterday when the networking giant introduced 31 new advisories and alerts. These announcements came on top of 11 high- and medium-impact vulnerabilities announced earlier in the month.

Of the 31 alerts, 23 are of medium impact, six are of high impact, and two are of critical impact to the organization and its security team.

Most of the medium-impact alerts are for cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, denial-of-service vulnerabilities, or vulnerabilities affecting unauthorized users and access. These were found on devices ranging from LAN controllers to wireless network access points to Cisco's new Umbrella security framework.

The two critical alerts are for two very different vulnerabilities. In one, a vulnerability in Cisco IOS and IOS XE could allow an attacker to reload the system on a device (potentially replacing the legitimate system with one containing malicious code), or remotely execute code at a privilege level above the level of the user being spoofed to gain access.

This vulnerability is found in the Cisco Cluster Management Protocol (CMP) and was discovered when the documents in the infamous Vault 7 disclosure were analyzed. That's bad news because those documents have been available to hackers around the world for more than two years. And the news gets worse: Researchers at Cisco Talos have published a blog post showing this vulnerability has been exploited in the wild as part of a DNS hijacking campaign dubbed "Sea Turtle."

Cisco already has released a software patch for this critical vulnerability, which has no operational workaround for successful remediation.

The second critical vulnerability could allow a remote attacker to gain access to applications running on a sysadmin virtual machine (VM) that is operating on Cisco ASR 9000 series Aggregation Services Routers. This vulnerability, Cisco says, was found during internal testing and has not yet been used in the wild. The source of the vulnerability – insufficient isolation of the management interface from internal applications – has been fixed in a pair of Cisco IOS XR software releases and does not, therefore, warrant a separate update, Cisco says.

Between the medium and critical vulnerabilities are six high-importance vulnerabilities that affect systems including telepresence video servers, wireless LAN controllers (three separate vulnerabilities), Aironet wireless access points, and the SNMP service.

Cisco ranks the severity of vulnerabilities using the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Version 3. Vulnerabilities with a CVSS score of 9.0 to 10.0 are critical, those in the range of 7.0 to 8.9 are high, and a score of 4.0 to 6.9 warrants a medium label. Anything ranking below medium is given an informational alert only.

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