Critical Cisco SD-WAN vManage and HyperFlex Vulnerabilities

THE THREAT

On May 5th, Cisco announced three critical vulnerabilities impacting the SD-WAN vManage and HyperFlex HX software. The vulnerabilities are tracked as CVE-2021-1468 (CVSS: 9.8), CVE-2021-1497 (CVSS: 9.8), and CVE-2021-1505 (CVSS: 9.1). CVE-2021-1468 and CVE-2021-1497 are especially concerning as they do not require any prior authentication. Exploitation of these vulnerabilities may result in the creation of new administrator accounts, command injection, authentication bypass, and privilege escalation.

Although exploit code is not publicly available, the severity and impact of these vulnerabilities on products will make these attractive targets for future attacks. Exploitation has not been identified at this time.

eSentire has recently observed highly aggressive threat actor activity attempting to exploit public-facing services. eSentire assesses that threat actors will adopt these vulnerabilities in attacks in the near future.

What we’re doing about it

• MVS will automatically add the relevant plugins for these vulnerabilities once details are made available
• eSentire security teams continue to track this topic for additional detection measures

What you should do about it

• After performing a business impact review, apply the relevant security patches provided by Cisco
  • There are currently no workarounds to mitigate these vulnerabilities

Additional information

CVE-2021-1468 (CVSS: 9.8) - Vulnerability impacting the Cisco SD-WAN vManage Software when operating in cluster mode, allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to send unauthorized messages resulting in the creation of new admin level accounts.

CVE-2021-1497 (CVSS: 9.8) – Vulnerability impacting the web-based management interface for Cisco HyperFlex HX Installer Virtual Machine that allows an unauthenticated, remote attacker to perform a command injection attack.

CVE-2021-1505 (CVSS: 9.1) - Vulnerability impacting the Cisco SD-WAN vManage Software when operating in cluster mode. An authenticated, remote attacker may exploit this vulnerability to bypass authorization checking and gain elevated privileges within the affected system.

In addition to these three critical vulnerabilities, Cisco also released patches for four high severity vulnerabilities: CVE-2021-1508, CVE-2021-1275, CVE-2021-1506, and CVE-2021-1498.

References:

[1] https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-sd-wan-vmanage-4TbynnhZ#
[2] https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-hyperflex-rce-TjjNrkpR