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The array of newly disclosed vulnerabilities in Cisco routers, together with 5 with a “important” severity ranking, have elevated cyber threat for companies of all sizes, cybersecurity executives instructed VentureBeat.
Among the many vulnerabilities are three that include the best potential severity ranking—together with a distant code execution (RCE) vulnerability and a flaw that permits distant customers to raise their privileges.
Whereas the 15 vulnerabilities have an effect on routers utilized by small and medium-sized companies (SMBs), companies massive and small are intertwined from a safety perspective in 2022. When an SMB doesn’t tackle a significant safety subject akin to this—due, as an illustration, to lack of sources—this could spill over into turning into an issue for the enterprises they do enterprise with.
“When SMBs get hacked, that may impression bigger organizations,” mentioned Matthew Warner, cofounder and chief expertise officer at Blumira, in an electronic mail.
Within the 2013 breach of Goal, as an illustration, the attackers reportedly gained their preliminary entry by hacking an HVAC contractor that had labored at Goal areas. Relatively than going after Goal immediately, the attackers breached the presumably less-protected contractor—and leveraged that to get entry to Goal’s surroundings, Warner mentioned.
“It’s a typical assault mechanism for menace actors to focus on MSPs or different SMBs which have broad entry into a lot of different larger organizations for his or her entry alone,” he mentioned.
‘Crucial’ flaws
This week, Cisco disclosed the 15 vulnerabilities which were found in its RV160, RV260, RV340, and RV345 Collection Routers. Cisco mentioned it has launched patches for the vulnerabilities, and that there aren’t any workarounds for the issues.
Three of the issues have been awarded the best potential severity ranking—10.0:
- CVE-2022-20699 is a vulnerability within the SSL VPN module of Cisco Small Enterprise RV340, RV340W, RV345, and RV345P Twin WAN Gigabit VPN Routers. The flaw can permit an unauthenticated attacker to remotely execute code on a susceptible machine, and will be exploited to amass root privileges, Cisco mentioned.
- CVE-2022-20700 is a vulnerability within the net interface used to handle Cisco Small Enterprise RV Collection Routers. The flaw can permit an attacker to remotely elevate their privileges to root, Cisco mentioned.
- CVE-2022-20708 is a vulnerability within the net interface used to handle Cisco Small Enterprise RV340, RV340W, RV345, and RV345P Twin WAN Gigabit VPN Routers. The flaw can permit an unauthenticated attacker to remotely inject and execute instructions on the underlying Linux working system, Cisco mentioned.
The 2 different “important” vulnerabilities are CVE-2022-20703—which may permit an unauthenticated native consumer to put in malicious software program, and has a severity ranking of 9.3—and CVE-2022-20701, which carries a 9.0 ranking and is said to the distant privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2022-20700).
In its advisory, Cisco famous that among the many 15 vulnerabilities, some “are depending on each other. Exploitation of one of many vulnerabilities could also be required to use one other vulnerability.”
Enterprise threat
The vulnerabilities are “very regarding” as a result of their severity and a number of assault vectors offered, mentioned Tim Silverline, vice chairman of safety at Gluware, in an electronic mail.
Whereas SMBs that use the routers are essentially the most immediately affected by the vulnerabilities, SMBs typically hook up with enterprise companions by way of VPN tunnels, Silverline famous. “It might be one other entry level into [the enterprise] community if these connections usually are not correctly secured,” he mentioned.
Thus, creating sturdy safety insurance policies on the enterprise border utilizing optimistic enforcement or zero belief applied sciences “may also help to mitigate a lot of the threat that these kinds of connections would pose,” Silverline mentioned.
The disclosure comes at a time of notably excessive consideration on software program vulnerabilities, following the reveal of the RCE flaw in Apache Log4j, a broadly used Java logging part, in December. Different main vulnerabilities disclosed lately have included “PwnKit,” which impacts a broadly put in Linux program—polkit’s pkexec—and will be simply exploited for native privilege escalation.
