Indian cyber agency warns users of multiple bugs in Cisco products

The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) which comes under the IT Ministry on Monday issued an advisory over three serious vulnerabilities in networking major Cisco products that could help hackers gain access, infiltrate into computer systems and steal data.

The vulnerabilities in products like routers and email/web manager could allow the attacker to gain unauthorised access, execute arbitrary commands and cause denial of service attack on an affected system, CERT-In said in its latest advisory.

The 'Security Bypass Vulnerability' exists in the external authentication functionality of Cisco Secure Email and Web Manager, formerly known as Cisco Security Management Appliance (SMA), and Cisco Email Security Appliance (ESA).

"An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by entering a specific input on the login page of the affected device," the cyber agency said.

Another 'Denial of Service Vulnerability' exists in the web-based management interface of Cisco small business routers "due to insufficient user input validation of incoming HTTP packets".

It could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code or cause an affected device to restart unexpectedly, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition.


"An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted request to the web-based management interface. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary commands on an affected device using root-level privileges," informed CERT-In.

The third, 'Information Disclosure Vulnerability' has also been spotted in the web management interface of Cisco Secure Email and Web Manager, which could allow the attacker to gain access to sensitive information, including user credentials from the external authentication server.

"To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker would need valid operator-level (or higher) credentials," said CERT-In, advising people to apply appropriate updates as released by Cisco.


Last week, the cyber agency issued an advisory over multiple vulnerabilities in Adobe and Citrix products that could help hackers infiltrate computer systems.

The bugs were reported in Adobe products like InDesign (along with earlier versions for Windows and macOS), InCopy, Illustrator, Bridge and Animate (and earlier versions for Windows and macOS). - IANS