Ethical Hacking News
Cisco has addressed a critical vulnerability (CVE-2025-20337) in its Identity Services Engine, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the underlying operating system with root privileges. The patch is essential for mitigating this high-severity flaw.
Cisco Systems has addressed a critical vulnerability (CVE-2025-20337) in its Identity Services Engine (ISE), with a CVSS score of 10. The vulnerability allows an unauthenticated, remote attacker to issue commands on the underlying operating system with root privileges. Cisco has released patches for the vulnerability, and devices running Release 3.4 Patch 2 are not affected. Organizations using Cisco ISE or related solutions must apply these patches to mitigate potential risks.
Cisco Systems, Inc., a leading multinational technology corporation, has taken proactive measures to address a critical vulnerability (CVE-2025-20337) affecting its Identity Services Engine (ISE). The identified bug carries an impressive CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) score of 10, signifying it as a high-severity flaw that can potentially be exploited by an attacker for malicious purposes.
According to the latest security advisory published by Cisco on July 17, 2025, the critical vulnerability in question allows an unauthenticated, remote attacker to issue commands on the underlying operating system with root privileges. This is made possible through insufficient validation of user-supplied input, which can be exploited by an attacker submitting a crafted API request. Once successfully exploited, this vulnerability could grant the attacker root access on the affected device.
The identified vulnerability (CVE-2025-20337) bears striking resemblance to another critical flaw, tracked as CVE-2025-20281, which was also addressed in June 2025 by Cisco. The latter vulnerability affects Cisco ISE/ISE-PIC 3.3+ and carries an equally high CVSS score of 10. Both identified vulnerabilities are attributed to the same root cause - insufficient validation of user-supplied input.
To mitigate this critical risk, Cisco advises upgrading to an enhanced fixed release for CVE-2025-20337. For devices running Release 3.4 Patch 2, no action is needed as the vulnerability has already been patched. However, systems with hot patches ise-apply-CSCwo99449_3.3.0.430_patch4-SPA.tar.gz or ise-apply-CSCwo99449_3.4.0.608_patch1-SPA.tar.gz should be updated to Release 3.3 Patch 7 or 3.4 Patch 2, as these patches do not fix the vulnerability and have been withdrawn from Cisco's official distribution.
The researcher behind the discovery of CVE-2025-20337 is Kentaro Kawane of GMO Cybersecurity, who disclosed the flaw through the Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative. It is worth noting that the Cisco PSIRT (Proactive Security Remediation Team) is not aware of any attacks in the wild exploiting these vulnerabilities at this time.
In addition to addressing the critical vulnerability in ISE, Cisco has also released patches for CVE-2025-20281, which affects Cisco ISE/ISE-PIC 3.3+. This vulnerability allows unauthenticated, remote attackers to execute code as root via a vulnerable API.
The impact of these vulnerabilities cannot be overstated, as they can potentially enable an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the underlying operating system with root privileges. This highlights the importance of keeping software up-to-date and applying patches in a timely manner.
In conclusion, Cisco's proactive response to addressing critical vulnerabilities like CVE-2025-20337 demonstrates its commitment to maintaining the security and integrity of its products and services. It is essential for organizations that utilize Cisco ISE or related solutions to take immediate action and apply these patches to mitigate potential risks.
Related Information:
https://www.ethicalhackingnews.com/articles/Cisco-Addresses-Critical-Vulnerability-in-Identity-Services-Engine-ehn.shtml
https://securityaffairs.com/180044/security/cisco-patches-critical-cve-2025-20337-bug-in-identity-services-engine-with-cvss-10-severity.html
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-20337
https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2025-20337/
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-20281
https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2025-20281/
Published: Thu Jul 17 13:39:05 2025 by llama3.2 3B Q4_K_M
