Cisco has announced fixes for three major vulnerabilities found in four different series of its SMB routers (opens in new tab).
The flaws, should they be exploited, would have allowed threat actors to launch code remotely, or trigger denial of service attacks.
Those that are unable to patch immediately are out of luck – there are no workarounds for these flaws, and the only way to mitigate the threat is to apply the fixes.
High-severity flaws galore
In Cisco’s security advisory (opens in new tab), the company said its Small Business RV160, RV260, RV340, and RV345 Series Routers were affected.
The flaws include CVE-2022-20827, a web filter database update command injection vulnerability with a severity score of 9.0.
“This vulnerability is due to insufficient input validation,” Cisco explains. “An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by submitting crafted input to the web filter database update feature. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute commands on the underlying operating system with root privileges.”
The second flaw is tracked as CVE-2022-20841, an open plug and play command injection vulnerability with a severity score of 8.3. This one is also due to insufficient validation of user-supplied input, and a successful exploit could allow the attacker to run arbitrary commands on an underlying Linux OS.
Finally, Cisco fixed CVE-2022-20842, a remote code execution and denial of service vulnerability with a severity score of 9.8.
“A vulnerability in the web-based management interface of Cisco RV340, RV340W, RV345, and RV345P Dual WAN Gigabit VPN Routers 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,” the company explained.
Cisco urged its users to patch immediately, especially due to the fact that the vulnerabilities are dependent on one another. “Exploitation of one of the vulnerabilities may be required to exploit another vulnerability,” the company said. “In addition, a software release that is affected by one of the vulnerabilities may not be affected by the other vulnerabilities.”