Cisco issued a warning of active exploitation attempts targeting two security vulnerabilities in the Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client for Windows.
The security flaws are tracked as CVE-2020-3153 (CVSS score: 6.5) and CVE-2020-3433 (CVSS score: 7.8), which allows the attacker to copy malicious files to arbitrary locations with system-level privileges. Both the vulnerabilities are dated 2020 and are now patched.
The vulnerability tracked as (CVE-2020-3153) resides in the installer component of the Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client for Windows.
This allows an authenticated local attacker to copy user-supplied files to system-level directories with system-level privileges.
Cisco mentions that this security flaw occurred due to the incorrect handling of directory paths. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by creating a malicious file and copying the file to a system directory.
This includes DLL pre-loading, DLL hijacking, and other related attacks. To exploit this vulnerability, the attacker needs valid credentials on the Windows system.
Cisco says this vulnerability affected the Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client for Windows releases earlier than 4.8.02042.
Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client for Windows releases 4.8.02042 and later contained the fix for this vulnerability.
This vulnerability resides in the interprocess communication (IPC) channel of the Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client for Windows that allows an authenticated, local attacker to perform a DLL hijacking attack.
“To exploit this vulnerability, the attacker would need to have valid credentials on the Windows system”, Cisco
The flaw is due to insufficient validation of resources that are loaded by the application at run time. Hence, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted IPC message to the AnyConnect process.
Cisco says this vulnerability affects Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client for Windows releases earlier than Release 4.9.00086.
This vulnerability does not affect the following Cisco products:
Cisco addressed this vulnerability in Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client for Windows releases 4.9.00086 and later.
“In October 2022, the Cisco PSIRT became aware of additionally attempted exploitation of this vulnerability in the wild,” Cisco warned.
“Cisco continues to strongly recommend that customers upgrade to a fixed software release to remediate this vulnerability.”
The alert follows the decision of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to add the two CISCO flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.
According to Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01: Reducing the Significant Risk of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities, FCEB agencies have to address the identified vulnerabilities by the due date to protect their networks against attacks exploiting the flaws in the catalog.
“These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and pose a significant risk to the federal enterprise”, Cisco
Reports say federal agencies were given three weeks, until November 11th, to address both CISCO vulnerabilities.
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