Friday, October 16, 2026

Privilege Escalation Flaw in Cisco ASA Allows Attackers To Read or Write Files in the System

A Privilege Escalation vulnerability discovered in Cisco ASA allows an lowest privilege user to overwrite the system’s firmware, full configuration file, and to create new users.

The vulnerability was identified by Tenable, tracked as CVE-2018-15465, allows a remote attacker to perform privileged actions in the web interface.

To exploit this vulnerability the attacker “requires the HTTP interface for IOS to be enabled, and the “aaa” authentication scheme needs to be set, which is not part of the ASAv default configuration.”

The vulnerability is due to the improper validation of user management in the webmanagement, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted HTTP requests through HTTPS to the affected as an unprivileged user.

An attacker could exploit the vulnerability to retrive files from the device or to upload and replace software images on the device.

The vulnerability affects all the Cisco ASA Software running with web management access enabled.

Now Cisco has released an advisory and patches, enabling command authorization prevents the exploitation of this vulnerability.

Cisco recommends “Administrators who use the Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM) to manage the ASA are advised to enable command authorization by using the ASDM because doing so will allow the ASDM to push predefined command sets for different privilege to the ASA.”

Related Read

Cisco Releases Security Updates that Covers 16 Vulnerabilities that had Critical and High Impact

Cisco Released Security Updates for Multiple Vulnerabilities that Affected Cisco Products

Cisco Released Critical Security Updates for Vulnerabilities that Affected Cisco Products

Gurubaran
Gurubaran
Gurubaran is a co-founder of Cyber Security News and GBHackers On Security. He has 10+ years of experience as a Security Consultant, Editor, and Analyst in cybersecurity, technology, and communications.

Hot this week

How To Access Dark Web Anonymously and know its Secretive and Mysterious Activities

What is Deep Web The deep web, invisible web, or...

How to Build and Run a Security Operations Center (SOC Guide) – 2023

Today’s Cyber security operations center (CSOC) should have everything...

Russian Hackers Bypass EDR to Deliver a Weaponized TeamViewer Component

TeamViewer's popularity and remote access capabilities make it an...

Web Server Penetration Testing Checklist – 2026

Web server pentesting is performed under three significant categories: identity,...

ATM Penetration Testing – Advanced Testing Methods to Find The Vulnerabilities

ATM Penetration testing, Hackers have found different approaches to...

Researchers Uncover 20,000 Malicious Cloudflare Pages Domains Used in Tech Support Scams

More than 20,000 malicious Cloudflare Pages subdomains used by...

Hackers Exploit BeyondTrust Zero-Day and Erase Security Logs to Hide Their Tracks

A suspected China-nexus espionage group exploited a critical zero-day...

Critical Collabora Online Flaw Lets Attackers Execute Commands on Nextcloud Servers

A critical unauthenticated OS command injection flaw in Collabora...

Hackers Use Hundreds of AI Agents to Exploit PaperCut Servers and Steal Windows Credentials

A likely Russian-speaking threat actor used hundreds of AI...

Microsoft Disrupts CoGUI Phishing Kit Linked to Over 100 Million Malicious Emails a Month

Microsoft and international partners have disrupted infrastructure supporting CoGUI....

12 Best Mobile Application Security Testing Tools Compared (2026): Features & Pricing

NowSecure and Data Theorem mobile security lead automated mobile...

12 Best SBOM Tools Compared (2026): Features & Pricing

Anchore’s Syft SBOM generator is the free generation standard,...

Related Articles

Recent News