Lucian Constantin
CSO Senior Writer

Cisco fixes serious vulnerabilities in email, Web, and content security appliances

news
Jun 28, 20132 mins

The vulnerabilities could allow attackers to inject commands and crash critical services

Cisco Systems released security patches for its email, Web, and content security appliances in order to address vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to execute commands on the underlying OS or disrupt critical processes.

The vulnerabilities affect different versions of the Cisco IronPort AsyncOS operating system that’s used in the Cisco Content Security Management Appliance, the Cisco Email Security Appliance and the Cisco Web Security Appliance.

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Releases 7.1 and prior, 7.3, 7.5 and 7.6 of the software in the Cisco Email Security Appliance are affected by three vulnerabilities, one that allows remote attackers to inject and execute commands with elevated privileges through the Web interface and two that could be used to crash the management graphical user interface (GUI) or the IronPort Spam Quarantine service and cause other critical processes to become unresponsive.

Exploiting the command injection vulnerability requires authentication via the Web interface with at least a low privilege account, but the denial-of-service vulnerabilities can be exploited remotely without authentication.

Users of the 7.1 branch should upgrade to version 7.1.5-016 or later, users of the 7.3 branch should upgrade to version 8.0.0-671 and users of the 7.5 and 7.6 branches should upgrade to 7.6.3-019 or later, Cisco said in a security advisory published Wednesday. Releases in the 8.0 branch are not affected.

Branches 7.2 and prior, 7.7, 7.8, 7.9 and 8.0 of the Cisco Content Security Management Appliance software are affected by the same command injection and denial-of-service vulnerabilities as the Cisco Email Security Appliance software.

All of the vulnerabilities are patched in versions 7.9.1-102 and 8.0.0-404, Cisco said in a separate advisory. Users of 7.2 and prior, 7.7 and 7.8 branches are advised to upgrade to version 7.9.1-102 or later of the software. The 8.1 versions are not affected.

Releases 7.1 and prior, 7.5 and 7.7 of the Cisco Web Security Appliance software are vulnerable to two authenticated command injection vulnerabilities and one management GUI denial-of-service vulnerability. Some of the vulnerabilities are the same as those affecting the Cisco Email Security Appliance software.

The software releases that include fixes for all three Cisco Email Security Appliance vulnerabilities are 7.5.1-201 and 7.7.0-602. Users of the 7.1 and prior versions are advised to upgrade to 7.5.1-201 or later.

Lucian Constantin

Lucian Constantin writes about information security, privacy, and data protection for CSO. Before joining CSO in 2019, Lucian was a freelance writer for VICE Motherboard, Security Boulevard, Forbes, and The New Stack. Earlier in his career, he was an information security correspondent for the IDG News Service and Information security news editor for Softpedia.

Before he became a journalist, Lucian worked as a system and network administrator. He enjoys attending security conferences and delving into interesting research papers. He lives and works in Romania.

You can reach him at lucian_constantin@foundryco.com or @lconstantin on X. For encrypted email, his PGP key's fingerprint is: 7A66 4901 5CDA 844E 8C6D 04D5 2BB4 6332 FC52 6D42

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