Cisco issues emergency fix for VPN tool, users told to update now

Cisco has issued an emergency hole for bugs successful immoderate of its package which are being actively exploited successful nan wild.

According to a information advisory from nan company, nan flaw that was patched was recovered successful Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA), and successful Firepower Threat Defense (FTD). It is described arsenic a assets exhaustion vulnerability, tracked arsenic CVE-2024-20481. It was fixed a mean severity standing of 5.8.

Describing nan mentation down nan attack, Cisco says an attacker could nonstop a ample number of VPN authentication requests to a susceptible device, exhausting its resources. That leads to a Denial-of-Service (DoS) authorities of nan Remote Access VPN (RAVPN) service. Furthermore, since nan attackers are sending authentication requests, 1 conscionable mightiness activity (depending connected nan spot of nan login credentials), giving nan miscreants unauthorized web access.

Abused successful nan wild

Depending connected nan effect of nan attack, nan victims whitethorn request to reconstruct nan RAVPN service, Cisco explained.

The bully news is that nan bug affects only those devices pinch distant entree VPN (RAVPN) work enabled. The bad news is nan bug is actively being exploited successful nan wild, and location is nary workaround. Cisco said it is "aware of malicious usage of nan vulnerability that is described successful this advisory," and nan US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added nan bug to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog.

Cisco’s VPN devices are hugely celebrated crossed nan world, and are being arsenic utilized by some SMBs and ample enterprises. Therefore, they are a awesome target for cybercriminals looking to weasel their measurement into firm IT infrastructure.

In fact, nan company’s cybersecurity department, Talos, precocious warned it’s search an summation successful brute-force attacks against VPNs, The Register reminds. "These attacks each look to beryllium originating from TOR exit nodes and a scope of different anonymizing tunnels and proxies," Talos said.

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