Immediate patching has been urged by Cisco for a critical flaw impacting its Smart Licensing Utility, tracked as CVE-2024-20439, following the discovery of its attempted exploitation last month, reports BleepingComputer.
Additional details regarding intrusions leveraging the vulnerability, which could result in the remote access of impacted systems, were not provided by Cisco. However, such a security issue was observed by SANS Technology Institute Dean of Research Johannes Ullirch to have been abused alongside another critical CSLU information disclosure bug, tracked as CVE-2024-20440, to compromise log files with API credentials and other sensitive details. "A quick search didn't show any active exploitation [at the time], but details, including the backdoor credentials, were published in a blog by Nicholas Starke shortly after Cisco released its advisory. So it is no surprise that we are seeing some exploit activity," said Ullrich. Federal agencies have already been urged by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to address the flaw by April 21 following its inclusion in the agency's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog earlier this week.
