February 11, 2016 By Nick Bradley 2 min read

Just when you think it’s safe to go back in the water, it hits!

Cisco recently disclosed a vulnerability alert. You might think, “This happens all the time. What’s one more vulnerability? How bad could it be?” Well in this case, it might just rival Heartbleed and Shellshock.

According to the Cisco ASA alert, this vulnerability, which was discovered by Exodus Intelligence, could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a reload of the affected system or remotely execute code. The reason this is such a critical vulnerability is because the devices affected are Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASAs), or firewalls — the very devices that many companies see as their first — and, for some, only — line of defense.

In response to the Cisco cisco-sa-20160210-asa-ike advisory, the IBM X-Force team has raised the global threat level to AlertCon 2 and will continue to actively assess the situation. Our threat research team has already caught wind of reconnaissance being done that could be the bad guys looking for potential targets.

Although at the time of disclosure the Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) was not aware of any active exploitation, details on how to develop exploit code for vulnerable ASA devices have already been made public. Current speculation is that this specific vulnerability might even be wormable.

The vulnerability can be triggered by UDP packets sent to the device and are caused by the lack of mitigation techniques such as address space layout randomization (ASLR) and Data Execution Prevention (DEP). This allows attackers to know exact offsets in memory and enables instructions stored in data segments to be executed.

Note that only traffic directed to the affected system can be used to exploit this vulnerability. This vulnerability affects systems configured in routed firewall mode only or in single or multiple context mode, and it can be triggered by IPv4 and IPv6 traffic.

To determine if your device is vulnerable, you can reference the list provided via the Cisco alert or run the following to check the running cryptomaps:

> ciscoasa# show running-config crypto map | include interface

If a cryptomap is returned, the device is vulnerable and you need to patch. We encourage all those affected to fire up emergency change window procedures and patch this vulnerability immediately. There is currently no workaround.

More from

SoaPy: Stealthy enumeration of Active Directory environments through ADWS

10 min read - Introduction Over time, both targeted and large-scale enumeration of Active Directory (AD) environments have become increasingly detected due to modern defensive solutions. During our internship at X-Force Red this past summer, we noticed FalconForce’s SOAPHound was becoming popular for enumerating Active Directory environments. This tool brought a new perspective to Active Directory enumeration by performing collection via Active Directory Web Services (ADWS) instead of directly through Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) as other AD enumeration tools had in the past.…

Smoltalk: RCE in open source agents

26 min read - Big shoutout to Hugging Face and the smolagents team for their cooperation and quick turnaround for a fix! Introduction Recently, I have been working on a side project to automate some pentest reconnaissance with AI agents. Just after I started this project, Hugging Face announced the release of smolagents, a lightweight framework for building AI agents that implements the methodology described in the ReAct paper, emphasizing reasoning through iterative decision-making. Interestingly, smolagents enables agents to reason and act by generating…

4 ways to bring cybersecurity into your community

4 min read - It’s easy to focus on technology when talking about cybersecurity. However, the best prevention measures rely on the education of those who use technology. Organizations training their employees is the first step. But the industry needs to expand the concept of a culture of cybersecurity and take it from where it currently stands as an organizational responsibility to a global perspective.When every person who uses technology — for work, personal use and school — views cybersecurity as their responsibility, it…

Topic updates

Get email updates and stay ahead of the latest threats to the security landscape, thought leadership and research.
Subscribe today