Cisco patches authentication, denial-of-service, NTP flaws in many products

Cisco Systems has released a new batch of security patches this week for flaws affecting a wide range of products, including for a critical vulnerability in its RV220W wireless network security firewalls.

The RV220W vulnerability stems from insufficient input validation of HTTP requests sent to the firewall’s Web-based management interface. This could allow remote unauthenticated attackers to send HTTP requests with SQL code in their headers that would bypass the authentication on the targeted devices and give attackers administrative privileges.

Cisco has patched this vulnerability in the 1.0.7.2 firmware version for RV220W devices. Manual workarounds include disabling the remote management functionality or restricting it to specific IP addresses.

The company also patched high- and medium-severity denial-of-service vulnerabilities in Cisco Wide Area Application Service (WAAS) appliances and modules, Cisco Small Business 500 Series switches, and the SG300 managed switch. A cross-site scripting vulnerability was also patched in the Web-based management interface of Cisco Unity Connection.

Finally, the company imported patches for 12 vulnerabilities in the Network Time Protocol daemon (ntpd) that were fixed on Jan. 19 by the Network Time Foundation. These flaws can be exploited by attackers to modify the time on devices or to crash the ntpd process.

Having the correct time on system is very important for a variety of applications, including for security-sensitive operations.

The NTP flaws are suspected to affect over 70 Cisco products used for collaboration and social media products, network and security, routing and switching, unified computing and communications, streaming and transcoding, wireless and hosted services.

The company has published firmware updates for some of them as well as a list of affected products and available patches that it will likely update as it releases more fixes.