CVE-2023-20269 — Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance and Firepower Threat Defense Unauthorized Access Vulnerability
Overview
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance and Firepower Threat Defense contain an unauthorized access vulnerability that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to conduct a brute force attack in an attempt to identify valid username and password combinations or establish a clientless SSL VPN session with an unauthorized user.
Vulnerability details
- CVE ID
- CVE-2023-20269
- Vulnerability
- Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance and Firepower Threat Defense Unauthorized Access Vulnerability
- Vendor
- Cisco
- Affected products
- Cisco: Adaptive Security Appliance and Firepower Threat Defense
- Severity
- HIGH
- Exploitation status
- Actively exploited in the wild (CISA KEV)
- Published
- 2023-09-13
Remediation guidance
CVE-2023-20269 is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog — U.S. federal civilian agencies are required to remediate it under Binding Operational Directive 22-01. Treat it as a priority for every environment.
Apply the vendor's official security update for Cisco the affected product as soon as possible. Where a patch is unavailable, apply vendor mitigations or isolate/segment exposed systems.
Hunt for indicators of compromise tied to this vulnerability and confirm logging/EDR coverage on affected assets.
Authoritative references
Remediate CVE-2023-20269 — and stay ahead of the next one
CVE-2023-20269 is listed in the CISA KEV catalog as actively exploited — treat remediation as urgent. Scan your domain free to see whether CVE-2023-20269 and other Cisco issues affect you and get a prioritized remediation report (full report from ₹999) — or stream the full feed of 1,600+ actively-exploited CVEs straight into your SOC.
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