Cisco fixes critical, high severity vulnerabilities in VPN routers

Cisco fixed critical, high severity pre-auth security vulnerabilities impacting multiple Small Business VPN routers.

Cisco addressed critical and high severity pre-auth security vulnerabilities that impact multiple Small Business VPN routers.

An attacker could exploit the issues to trigger a denial of service condition or execute commands and arbitrary code on impacted multiple Small Business VPN routers.

The two vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2021-1609 and CVE-2021-1602, resides in the web-based management interfaces. Both flaws could be exploited by a remote, unauthenticated attacker without any user interaction, just by

CVE-2021-1609 affects the Cisco Small Business RV340, RV340W, RV345, and RV345P Dual WAN Gigabit VPN Routers, it received a CVSS score of 9.8.

“This vulnerability exists because HTTP requests are not properly validated. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted HTTP request to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code on the device or cause the device to reload, resulting in a DoS condition.” reads the advisory.

The CVE-2021-1602 affects RV160, RV160W, RV260, RV260P, and RV260W VPN routers, it received a CVSS score of 8.2.

“This vulnerability is due to insufficient user input validation. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted request to the web-based management interface.” states the advisory.

Cisco pointed out that the remote management feature is disabled by default on the impacted VPN routers.

“The web-based management interface for these devices is available through local LAN connections by default and cannot be disabled there. The interface can also be made available through the WAN interface by enabling the remote management feature. By default, the remote management feature is disabled on affected devices.” continues the advisory.

The IT giant says no workarounds are available to secure the devices, the Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is not aware of attacks in the wild exploiting the above flaws.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, VPN routers)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.