Cisco IOS XE | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The backdoor implanted on Cisco devices by exploiting a pair of zero-day flaws in IOS XE software has been modified by the threat actor so as to escape visibility via previous fingerprinting methods. "Investigated network traffic to a compromised device has shown that the threat actor has upgraded the implant to do an extra header check," NCC Group's Fox-IT team  said . "Thus, for a lot of devices, the implant is still active, but now only responds if the correct Authorization HTTP header is set." The attacks entail fashioning  CVE-2023-20198  (CVSS score: 10.0) and  CVE-2023-20273  (CVSS score: 7.2) into an exploit chain that grants the threat actor the ability to gain access to the devices, create a privileged account, and ultimately deploy a Lua-based implant on the devices. The development comes as Cisco began rolling out security updates to  address the issues , with more updates to come at an as-yet-undisclosed date. The exact identity of the th...

Cisco has warned of a critical, unpatched security flaw impacting IOS XE software that's under active exploitation in the wild. Rooted in the web UI feature, the zero-day vulnerability is tracked as  CVE-2023-20198  and has been assigned the maximum severity rating of 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system. It's worth pointing out that the shortcoming only affects enterprise networking gear that have the web UI feature enabled and when it's exposed to the internet or to untrusted networks. "This vulnerability allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to create an account on an affected system with privilege  level 15 access ," Cisco  said  in a Monday advisory. "The attacker can then use that account to gain control of the affected system." The problem impacts both physical and virtual devices running Cisco IOS XE software that also have the HTTP or HTTPS server feature enabled. As a mitigation, it's recommended to disable the HTTP server feature on internet-facin...