FalehSec Exploited-vulnerability triage · joined from CISA KEV, NVD CVSS and EPSS

CVE-2024-20481

Cisco · Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) and Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) · Cisco ASA and FTD Denial-of-Service Vulnerability

Verdict
Patch first · actively exploited, reachable from the internet without credentials, and in the top 5% of CVEs by near-term exploitation probability

Added to CISA KEV 2024-10-24 · exploited in the wild for 703 days

What an attacker can reach How likely Time What CISA says to do Sources All 545

What an attacker can reach

CVSS 5.8 MEDIUM. The score is a summary; these three components are the part that decides whether something scanning the internet can use it.

Attack vectornetworkreachable over the network, with no local access needed
Privileges requirednoneneeds no credentials at all
User interactionnonecan be triggered with nobody interacting with the page or request
Base vectorCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:L
WeaknessCWE-772

This describes the vulnerability. It says nothing about whether your systems run it.

How likely

EPSS puts the probability of exploitation in the next 30 days at 0.1575, which places it in the top 5% of all tracked CVEs. The percentile is the more useful half: 0.18 in absolute terms sounds low until you know most of the internet-facing software in the world scores under that.

EPSS probability0.1575
Percentile0.968 — top 5%

Time

Added to KEV2024-10-24
Days exploited703
Federal remediation duenot set
Ransomware useno known ransomware campaign use

What CISA says to do

Apply mitigations per vendor instructions or discontinue use of the product if mitigations are unavailable.

A vulnerability in the Remote Access VPN (RAVPN) service of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) of the RAVPN service. This vulnerability is due to resource exhaustion. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a large number of VPN authentication requests to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to exhaust resources, resulting in a DoS of the RAVPN service on the affected device. Depending on the impact of the attack, a reload of the device may be required to restore the RAVPN service. Services that are not related to VPN are not affected. Cisco Talos discussed these attacks in the blog post Large-scale brute-force activity targeting VPNs, SSH services with commonly used login credentials.

Sources