A critical vulnerability has been identified recently in FortiGate firewalls and FortiProxy Web Proxy. While FortiGate has already alerted its customers about the issue. 

If an attacker is able to successfully exploit this critical vulnerability, they would potentially be able to take over the device without the user’s consent and perform unauthorized and illicit actions.

The critical vulnerability has been tracked as CVE-2022-40684 with a CVSS score of 9.6 and it’s an auth bypass bug on the administrative interface.

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An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by creating a specially crafted HTTP(S) request and executing it against the administrative interface to perform arbitrary actions.

Affected products and versions

This critical vulnerability has affected the following products and their versions:-

• FortiOS version 7.2.0 through 7.2.1
• FortiOS version 7.0.0 through 7.0.6
• FortiProxy version 7.2.0
• FortiProxy version 7.0.0 through 7.0.6
• FortiSwitchManager version 7.2.0
• FortiSwitchManager version 7.0.0

There is no information available regarding if the vulnerability has been exploited in the wild or not since the Fortinet officials declined to comment on this.

However, Fortinet has acknowledged that CVE-2022-40684 has been exploited in at least one attack since it issued the private advisory.

Patch

Fortinet has sent out an alert to users with affected versions urging them to immediately upgrade to those versions that have been fixed.

All the fixed versions are listed below so that you can check them out:-

• Upgrade to FortiOS version 7.2.2 or above
• Upgrade to FortiOS version 7.0.7 or above
• Upgrade to FortiProxy version 7.2.1 or above
• Upgrade to FortiProxy version 7.0.7 or above
• Upgrade to FortiSwitchManager version 7.2.1 or above

Until updates are installed, the company recommends that users disable HTTPS administration as a temporary security measure to ensure the integrity of the system.

In addition, the Local-In firewall policy can be used by the user to restrict access to the FortiGate admin interface as an alternative option.

While the Proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code will be soon released, probably later this week in coordination with the Horizon3 Attack Team security researchers.

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