A important safety vulnerability has been recognized within the Cisco Catalyst Middle Digital Equipment that might allow authenticated, distant attackers to escalate their privileges to Administrator on affected methods.
This vulnerability CVE-2025-20341 brought on by inadequate validation of user-supplied enter, underscores the pressing want for patching amongst organizations that use the affected platform.
The vulnerability resides inside the Cisco Catalyst Middle Digital Equipment working on VMware ESXi.
Based on Cisco’s official advisory, the vulnerability permits an attacker with reliable credentialsspecifically, any person account holding no less than the Observer position to submit crafted HTTP requests to the system.
Profitable exploitation allows attackers to carry out unauthorized system modifications, reminiscent of creating new person accounts or elevating their very own privileges, thereby compromising the equipment’s administrative controls.
This danger is very regarding as a result of attackers don’t want preliminary Administrator privileges to use the vulnerability. As a substitute, any legitimate Observer-level account supplies a foothold for privilege escalation, considerably increasing the potential assault floor inside organizations utilizing this infrastructure.
Product Scope and Affect
The vulnerability completely impacts Cisco Catalyst Middle Digital Home equipment deployed on VMware ESXi, no matter system configuration.
Catalyst Middle {hardware} home equipment and digital deployed on Amazon Internet Providers (AWS) are confirmed to not be weak.
Solely the merchandise explicitly listed within the Weak Merchandise part of Cisco’s advisory are impacted, guaranteeing a focused improve path for patrons.
For particulars on which software program releases are weak and which include the required repair, Cisco directs directors to the advisory’s Fastened Software program part.
Notably, Catalyst Middle variations sooner than 2.3.7.3-VA and model 3.1 will not be affected, whereas releases 2.3.7.3-VA and later require an improve to no less than 2.3.7.10-VA to resolve the problem.
Cisco emphasizes that there are not any viable workarounds or non permanent mitigations. Clients should improve to the mounted software program launch to guard towards exploitation. This underscores the urgency for directors to promptly determine if their deployment falls inside the affected variations and schedule instant updates.
On the time of the advisory’s launch, Cisco’s Product Safety Incident Response Group (PSIRT) had not detected any proof of malicious exploitation or public bulletins relating to this vulnerability.
The difficulty was found internally as a part of a Cisco Technical Help Middle (TAC) assist case, reasonably than by way of exterior reporting or detection of in-the-wild assaults.
Cisco strongly urges all clients utilizing the affected merchandise to seek the advice of the official safety advisory and instantly improve to a set software program launch.
Since no workarounds exist, that is the one dependable technique of mitigating the chance and guaranteeing continued safety compliance.
Directors are suggested to assessment their present deployment, confirm the working Catalyst Middle model, and apply upgrades as indicated in Cisco’s documentation. Making use of these fixes not solely addresses the instant privilege escalation vulnerability but in addition affirms finest practices in proactive cybersecurity danger administration.
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