Hardcoded Password Found in Cisco Software [source: bleepingcomputer]

11 Mar 2018

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Cisco released 22 security advisories yesterday, including two alerts for critical fixes, one of them for a hardcoded password that can give attackers full control over a vulnerable system.

The hardcoded password issue affects Cisco’s Prime Collaboration Provisioning (PCP), a software application that can be used for the remote installation and maintenance of other Cisco voice and video products. Cisco PCP is often installed on Linux servers.

Cisco says that an attacker could exploit this vulnerability (CVE-2018-0141) by connecting to the affected system via Secure Shell (SSH) using the hardcoded password.

Flaw considered critical despite “local” attack vector

The flaw can be exploited only by local attackers, and it also grants access to a low-privileged user account. In spite of this, Cisco has classified the issue as “critical.”

Although this vulnerability has a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Base score of 5.9, which is normally assigned a Security Impact Rating (SIR) of Medium, there are extenuating circumstances that allow an attacker to elevate privileges to root. For these reasons, the SIR has been set to Critical.

The reasons are that an attacker can infect another device on the same network and use it as a proxy for his SSH connection to the vulnerable Cisco PCP instance, allowing for remote, over-the-Internet exploitation.

Furthermore, there is a large number of elevation-of-privilege exploits affecting the Linux operating system that an attacker can use and gain root access. Hence, Cisco’s decision to classify this flaw as “critical” even with a CVSS score of 5.9 out of a maximum of 10.

Cisco says there are no temporary mitigations and workarounds that network admins can deploy to prevent exploitation of older PCP software, and the company has released patches that PCP owners need to install as soon as possible.

For more, click here.